Please help me to help my DD communicate her feelings.

[Callisto]

Hi all,

My DD is a bright and articulate 4.8 year old who started reception in Sept 09. During the last week of school before the Christmas hols she began to show signs of school refusal but seemed fine at the end of the day. She has been back for 2 days and it is much worse. She cried and cried yesterday when I left her and today DH took her in and she cried and cried when she left the house.

When we ask her what is wrong and what she doesn't like about school (which, even to my jaundiced eyes, is a good, pastoral school with small class sizes) she merely tells us that she is tired.

I need to give her some way of describing how she feels. As background, whenever she has been in an uncomfortable situation she has used the 'tired' excuse and it dates from me excusing her reticence as tiredness when she was very little. She has always been reserved with people she doesn't know, far more so than any other child I've met, and I didn't want to give her the 'shy' label. So now I've given her the 'tired' label inadvertantly .

So, if anyone has any strategies for teaching my DD to express her feelings I'd be very grateful. Thanks.

[FrameyMcFrame]

My DD uses 'tummy ache' when she is upset about something.

If you talk about your feelings it might encourage her to open up about her own?

With DD I find that she talks about things more readily when we are in the car than at home, for some reason.
If you can find a clue to what's upsetting her you could start off by saying,

'when I was a little girl like you X, Y or Z happened to me and it upset me and I felt like X, Y or Z'

and try to get a chat started that way.

[Chaotica]

Watching with interest (but no ideas I'm afraid) - I have a tired, shy DD with a tummy ache. Oh, and her knee hurts...

[ThumbleBells]

This is a completely untested idea in this context but could be worth a go - instead of asking her what is wrong etc., which she may not be able to actually get her head around, ask her more general stuff about school e.g.
What did you do today at school, who was there, who did you play with, what did you have for lunch..

If you ask general non-loaded questions, she may answer them better and you might be able to pick out the problems from her answers.

And Framey's idea is a good one too but at that age they are sometimes so literal that unless you hit the exact situation she is in, she night not relate to it.

[ThumbleBells]

you need to ask her a non-loaded question about her teacher as well, I just couldn't think of one in the moment of writing that post.

Hope she feels better soon and you get to the bottom of it, poor little thing (yours too, Chaotica)

[Callisto]

Thanks all for the replies. She had a better day today, tomorrow she has the day off so will see how she is on Thurs (it's show and tell which she loves).

She did tell me this afternoon that she feels lonely and a bit scared when she goes in to school, though I'm not sure if I'm putting words in her mouth as I used the same words to describe how I feel in certain situations to try and give her an example.

[MrsMalcolmTucker]

Have you tried playing schools with her, so she can be the teacher, and tell you what the children do? then you can get a better idea of what happens and how she feels about it.

Or how about talking about what she can do when she feels 'tired' in school - role playing and practising, so that she can come up with some ideas for herself about how to handle things? I did this with my dd (4.2 yrs) when it looked like some friends were excluding her, and she's a lot more confident about it now.

[Chaotica]

Thanks - there are some good ideas here. DD hasn't even started reception yet (she's at nursery every morning) and I'm beginning to worry about next year.

(My problem with the non-loaded questions at the moment is that DD says what she thinks we want to hear (well we do want to hear it, but only if it's true). So she says she's had a lot of fun and played with all the children, in the kind of voice that says she's making it up (and closer questioning usually catches her out).