A few days ago we started talking about the overprotection of fathers and mothers towards children, that which limits and slows them down in their development and that can lead to a child not taking sufficient autonomy and taking longer to be independent than others.
We commented on a question that had appeared on the web in a test about overprotection and today we will do the same with another related to our way of acting in the face of our son's crying when he went to school for the first time. Go for it.
To start, and as we did in the previous post, we will know the question we will play this week:
It is the first day of school for your three-year-old son and, when you say goodbye to him, he cries inconsolably and grabs his hair frantically.
Now, like the other time, we will know the answers:
a) You decide that you can postpone a little when you go to school. Poor, it's so tiny!
b) Ask the educator if you can stay a few hours with him until he adapts to the class and you can leave without realizing it.
c) You wait for a little crying and start the class. Then you say goodbye with tenderness, but firmly. You have already prepared him psychologically, because you have explained for days what this experience would be like.
As you can see, again the extension of the answer gives us a clue as to what is correct according to the vision of who created the test, come on, that the logical thing would be to answer c).
I take it home
The first answer says that as the child cries inconsolably and clings frantically to your hair you decide that this is not the time to go to school because, crying so much, he is demonstrating that he is still small and immature and that he is not yet prepared to be left alone, without mom or dad, at school.
This would be a response linked to overprotection and It is considered that if this is the option you choose you are showing that you protect too much, by doing nothing to prevent me from crying and giving up right away.
At the beginning of the answer b) with “Questions to the educator if you can stay a few hours with him” it is assumed that in the answer a) the consultation to the educator is not carried out, so the parents' action is summarized in a “ you arrive at school, the child cries and, as he is small, you leave ”. Of course, this is a bit of an exaggeration speaking in terms of overprotection, because the father does not intervene to try to make that arrival at school a less traumatic moment.
For that reason alone, I would not choose option a). Now, if the wording were as follows: “You ask the educator if you can stay a few hours with him, until he is calmer and can stay after saying goodbye to you,” then he would choose it.
Then we add the decision to go home: “You ask the educator if you can stay a few hours with him, until he is calmer and can stay after saying goodbye to you. After a while, the child continues to cry inconsolably and does not accept to run out of you, so you decide to take him home, ”and I confirm that I would also choose this option. The next day I would do exactly the same, and so on until my son stayed well. In case of not achieving it, after several days and after losing hope, it would mark the authentic a), postponing the moment of starting to go to school and saying that: “Poor, it is so small!”.
I stay but I leave without saying goodbye
The second answer starts very well, asking the educator if you can stay with him for a few hours, although the “hours” will surely squeak for many people, but then it will distort, because the will of the mother or father to accompany the child and help him to adapt vanishes when wanting to disappear without warning.
As we have commented several times, that is not done. Get the child to be calm and playing and disappearing suddenly is a stab in the back to the child, that seeing that mom has disappeared, she starts crying as if she had been kidnapped or teleported. Then the caretaker comes and tells him to be calm, that mom has gone a while and that now he returns and the child sees his confusion increase, because if he has not been abducted or kidnapped, why on earth has he not said goodbye to him ... does he not love you?
Then it happens what happens, that the child, tired of mom or dad disappear from the nursery just at the moment he does not look, decides that the same thing does not happen again and choose not to let go of your legs neither day nor night, at which time the parents have the feeling that the child, instead of going forward, goes backwards.
I think it is clear with all this argumentation that option b) would never choose it.
I stay a little while, but then I go, because you already knew that this was so
The third option, c), which is what we are expected to respond to, is the one that most of us would surely choose. We stay with the child until he is calmer and then, with love and security, we say goodbye to him. In order for the child to remain calm (or as calm as possible), use is made of the dialogue previously at home and the techniques to anticipate what will happen, the most common being the symbolic game that we have already commented on other occasions.
My attitude from now on would depend on how my son stays, because there are children who cry in despair. The number of education professionals who support my advice will probably be a minority, but if my son came in crying like that I wouldn't leave him at school.
Let's not forget that they are still 2-3 years old children and many of them are still very young, maturingly speaking, to get along with that of separating from their parents. If a child cries until he shouts, I will take him to be calmer. They are children, they are human (we are supposed to be too), and I think that we have to go to school to have fun and learn, not to be overwhelmed crying and thinking when mom will come.
Schooling, as you know, It is not mandatory until 6 years (and not even then, because you can also learn without going to school). This is so, more than likely, because it is logical (of drawer, I would say) to think that not all children will be happy and happy at 3 years.
Many will go well the first day, many will not go well until mid-year, many will not go well until they are 4 years old and many will not go well until 5 or 6, or maybe never, namely. The fact is that I do not find it logical to force a child who does not want to go to school to go if he is going to have such a bad time. Some will call it overprotection and others, like me, will call it common sense, because I, for example, did not do p3 and because I doubt that what I learned in p4 and p5 marked me so much that I needed to have gone to school those years.
