Recent study of children joining reception class

If they’re 2.5 years old there’s still plenty of time before starting school. I’d just take another week off and try again personally.

Thank you for saying this. I really don’t like this SAHP vs working parent culture. SAHPs are perfectly capable of looking after their children properly. I’m not sure asserting that your children are fine and hit milestones because they were in a nursery all day and nursery did the majority of the potty training really bigs up the argument that therefore their parenting is better?

Interesting the ones who blame parents who work FT - where's the logic there?Their kids will have presumably been in nursery a lot, so won't have been stuck in front of a screen!

I'd imagine a lot of it is due to ND DC that have gone under the radar. Lazy teaching as many on this thread would call it. My DS was potty trained at reception but struggled to do lots of things his peers could do. He was labelled 'naughty' by his teachers and excluded. She was the SEN lead for the school. He moved schools in Year 1 and had an EHCP by year 2. Whilst I appreciate funding is tight, there are lots of poor teachers and schools. Many people have the same experience as me. There are lots of parents that are doing twice as much as most, but get labelled lazy by people that are lucky to have much easier DC to parent.

dont forget the study shows a quarter of children.
not 50%
or 75%

many children struggled with stairs?
how many?

OP if you read the actual survey and report you'll see that teachers do precisely put it down to the Covid lockdowns and all the measures and screen use which became out of proportion due to them.

It changed behaviour for years to come.

Children starting Reception or those now in nursery, years 1, 2, 3, 4 and most of primary are the babies, toddlers and very young children of exactly that generation.

And you'll remember that life didn't return to normal for a year or two after all the Covid stuff officially was ended. Even now, still, there are people who are testing, wearing face masks and see a running nose as something to be weary of.

People don't hug and kiss that much and socialising behaviour has changed. So much more time is spent indoors. Read the threads about playdates not being a thing, etc. Social workers still often dont come out, working from home etc. Appointments online (which isn't always a bad thing, of course).

Consequences of the three years of the measures will span years and children are the most affected by all.

It also taught parents not to pay for nursery or before/after school and holiday clubs instead plonking the kids in front of the devices.

It’s phones. People are on their phones constantly and not interacting.

Indeed - with more available hours to read to them and play games.

DGC goes to nursery 4 days a week. DGC's nursery have not worked with us over the potty training.

DD had taken a week off work to to the potty training, it was so close and after one week back Nursery asked that they went in nappies and not pants. DGC regressed and 6 months later DGC is refusing to use the potty. They are in a group where the rest are all out of nappies so they have timed visits to the toilet which is not really helping,

DGC is 2.1/2 and we are all concerned they will be one of the ones going to reception who is still in nappies

the health visiting service has been completely run down,
they phone to do checks,
the nursery of course needs to improve in their child care
and of course screen time is such a cop out for parents who are so busy!

With my first child, the health visitor said not to start potty training until 3. We had a conversation about being a bit old for nappies and they just switched to pants with only one accident the first time we went out as they forgot they weren't wearing a nappy.
One of my children was 18 months and just couldn't stand being wet. They started waking me and demanding to be taken to the toilet, so that was that. Dry day and night from 18 months and nothing whatsoever to do with their parents.
One of my children was just turned 2 and had far more accidents up until the age of 3. To be fair, all children were in cloth nappies and trying to potty train the last child a bit before ready probably was lazy parenting as I was ready to do away with the extra washing and carrying heavy bags of nappies around.

I never understood the pressure on potty training. I think if you watch your child there is a point where they're ready.

If anything, lockdown children should've been more likely to start school toilet trained, able to read simple words, climb stairs, do up their coat zips etc because their parents were at home!

One of my DC speaks with an American accent because we used to live there and whilst it’s definitely faded, it hasn’t completely gone. Bit worried now that random strangers are judging us and assuming she spends all her free time on YouTube 😬 Which she doesn’t watch.

As a working mum, where both parents in the household work full time, I would say it’s more down to parental attitude than working hours, although of course that features in it.

Putting the TV, iPad, games console on etc is choice. Are parents too, addictive to their devices?

Potty training a child before 4 isn’t delayed due to work.

Giving your kid an iPad on a journey when they can look out of the window and chat isn’t due to work.

Putting the tv on instead of reading them a story isn’t due to work.

Having said all that, parents need support. Whether that’s each other, a grandparent, good friends or financial support for quality childcare. I feel for single parents, it must be bloody hard and I can easily see why a screen would feature heavily then.

Haha no, they tell me very openly and proudly. In fact it a running joke amongst them how much the nursery and grandparents will do for them so they don't have to get their hands dirty. Quite an entitled and disappointing attitude imo.

Implying that parents of children at state schools are all lazy. Labour wants the 'non lazy parents' to put their children in state schools with them , as YOU say. Shoe horning VAT on private school fees into everything 🙄😂

There's this, but also the more mundane things went too, the backdrop of ordinary life. As it turns out, some people relied on the collective norms and cues of everyday life to parent properly, more so than others. These customs and behaviours are not light switches that can be switched back on in a second.

Personally I’m not bothered by an American accent. Many Europeans speak English with an American accent as they’ve had so much exposure to US TV programmes. A Danish friend’s little sister, who was 6 at the time, learned English from watching the movie Grease. A lot of well-heeled Southern European families at my child’s school are the same, as are some from Israel / UAE. They are definitely more of a US accent than a British one.

It much more likely that children are being prevented from climbing stairs because it's seen as dangerous

Did the study have any sex differences recorded ?

I disagree that Covid can’t be part of the reason. The children that started reception in September were born between sept 2019 and August 2020. Their infancy was affected by lack of services, and I would not be surprised if the parents mental health also suffered. The children were also potentially exposed to Covid in the womb or as a newborn.
My DC2 is in this age group, and is still dealing with a health issue which was never properly addressed as a baby because all health visitor appointments were over the phone, it was next to impossible to see a GP and no one would see him in person.

Well, some people don't have stairs at home, and access to many other buildings was limited/restricted, or potentially unsafe if you live in a high rise.
I think that all parents can attempt to potty train, of course, but then some developmental issues would have gone more undiagnosed/unsupported perhaps during Covid.
You didn't say it wasn't hard for you, I stand corrected, but you still judged others because their experience might have been a different type of hard than yours!

I've worked in primary schools and there are lots of kids who routinely use American language such as diapers.
I can't ask them if they've seen a film as they don't understand. I have to say movie.
So many kids never go anywhere over the weekend and stay at home gaming or watching YouTube.
Most of the children over 8 don't even watch tv and it's just YouTube or gaming.

https://kindredsquared.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/School-Readiness-Survey-January-2025-Kindred-Squared.pdf

that’s the research if anyone is interested. The stairs thing is a comment by one person.

With the toilet training, I honestly think that the advice here changed to say, no rush train at 3 or beyond. So people are only starting to think about it at 3. But -partly because the nappies and pull ups are so comfy and absorbent, and partly because kids get set in their ways at that age - I think people are missing this potty training window and then are running into trouble with older kids who are happy in their nappies.

Something's changed and the only thing I can think of is 24/7 children's TV, streaming and smartphones. There have always been inadequate and neglectful parents. But now there are more of them due to overuse of these things.

All the other factors mentioned on this thread have always been there.

It's not the fault of State education though, it's the fault of lazy parents