To be shocked at ‘school readiness’

Children at nursery/childminders should be putting their shoes/coats on, being taught to follow basic rules.

Great for you. Statistically less great for young parents.
I know teen pregnancies have reduced. I also know that at my kids' school, which has high levels of deprivation, there are a lot of very young parents, and that there is a crossover.

"Children born to teenage mothers face a 63% higher risk of living in poverty. By age 30, mothers who gave birth as teenagers are 22% more likely to live in poverty than those who had children at age 24 or older." https://share.google/E2KhzpYHcwvTFwd4w

I am working class, but I don’t give my children UPFs and we try to eat as much organic as possible. She also suggested a higher number of SAHMs might be a factor in her school (comparing middle class bubble to middle class bubble to try and see what might affect it). I think you missed the point of that posters comments, in your attempt to defend working class people which is actually quite classist in itself.

Working class people are not all incapable of being SAHMs (my DH is a builder and earns well enough that I don’t have to work. I do a small amount of hairdressing, mobile, when my DC are at school/weekends so I am always around for them), and we’re not incapable of seeing the damage of UPFs or non-organic food, thank you very much.

When did I say anything about creative play.
I said gentle parenting sometimes impacts the behaviour of children in mainstream.
Gentle isn’t about nurturing creativity.

The worst behaved children IME always, always had very strict parents that seemed to constantly shout at their kids!

We are a three-form-entry school, and all three classes are experiencing the same thing. We have a nursery attached to our school, and the children who have come from our school nursery are miles ahead of those who have come from private nurseries.
We visit each nursery to meet every child before they start, and, honestly, some of the private nurseries I wouldn’t leave a dog in. A small number of children have been at home with a parent or grandparent.

France is 3 years old.

And to be honest, the age doesn't matter - the parents do. We managed perfectly well for years with children being potty trained, able to do the basics. The only thing that's changed is parenting. Going to school at 6/7 without learning the basics is just going to school still without the basics.

Even more urgent we return to play led 'school" until much older. Ie. 6 or 7 like in most countries.

Children need to develop physically emotionally and socially before pressure of formal learning.

And by the way this doesn't mean kids can't learn to read and write alongside the play it just means they aren't pushed through a relentless sedentary cirroculum

If it is true that things are getting worse then clearly that isn't happening.

We held a meeting for our September reception parents in July. When it was explained that children need to out of nappies (barring medical need), recognise their written name, use a knife and fork etc we were met with some very surprised faces. A couple if parents actually believe it is the schools job to potty train. During a school tour they were shown the toilets and asked the teacher where the potties are! We don’t have potties! In the dining hall last week most and by that I mean more than half of our reception children were eating their lunch (pasta bolognaise) with their hands. Staff were encouraging them to use forks or spoons but they couldn’t work out how to hold the utensils. And before anyone says “cultural” these are white British children. We have an unusually (for us) low percentage of black (African, Caribbean or other) children in our reception class this year and they are toilet trained, and use cutlery.

My mother was a primary school teacher up to the mid 1980s. For the last ten years or so she taught Reception and Year 1. It very definitely wasn't like this back then, nor was it like that when my children started Reception in the late 1990s. I saw this first hand as I volunteered in class once a week for several years. In a very socially and ethnically mixed area hardly any children struggled with basic tasks such as the OP describes.

Was also going to ask - what is the demographic?

I find this really hard to believe. My 2.5 year old says please/thank you without prompting most of the time and responds to her name. She can also hang up her coat and close the bathroom door. I don't do any exceptional parenting, in fact she's a bit overlooked as the second kid. The only thing I can think of is screens but we do too much of that as well. I do think 4 is young for school, 6 is the norm in most of the world but kids should be doing most of what you mentioned regardless of being in school or not.

But given that teenage pregnancies are at a historic low in the UK and there are FAR less teenage parents than a few decades ago, it doesn’t really make sense when we are discussing children and parenting today.

whats being poor got to do with anything? I had no family support lived in a hostel for two years. Not much money. Still taught them how to be ready for school. Actually couldn’t afford an iPad for them even if I wanted to (which I wouldn’t) which is probably the reason so many kids are behind because they spend so long looking at an iPad.

The ability to blame teen parents when there are far less teen pregnancies than ever before is amazing. Cognitive dissonance really

It absolutely is and this is why I know you don't know what you are chatting about!

How can creative play be explored as well if at all if you ar stifling any opportunity for intellectual curiosity as your parenting technique is concerned with obedience and a lack of freedom?

@Thesillysocks

I can attest to this. Whilst not the only group to have a reputation of misbehaving, a colleague of mine who worked around children could predict how naughty or entitled a child would be based off what very middle class name they had, particularly if it was a boy with long hair. The parents never thought they'd have to teach their darlings how to behave or be polite, and that everyone would naturally be delighted with their child.

I've seen that behaviour myself - kids who come into a shop and start grabbing or moving everything, tearing things down, doing things to get attention.

@Copyandpastry how many children do you have op? And yes, before kids people are entitled to their opinions , as a mum and teacher myself the biggest experts in parenting were teachers pre kids ! I myself was guilty 😂😂

I work in a primary school in a deprived area in the south east and I absolutely believe you. This is our most difficult cohort yet. We couldn't even get them into the lunch hall until Thursday because the (amazing, very experienced) reception teacher could not get them to walk down the corridor safely, stand in a line or follow any instructions. The sad part is there are 3 or 4 children that instantly got the routines and just look really confused and sad amongst the chaos.

We’ve been seeing this for a while at least over the last 8 years and what’s confusing is these are the children who have been to nursery??? Why are they not being taught the skills to be school ready when already in an early years setting ?!!

Im noticing more and more non sen dc who the parents report got put back into pull ups at nursery as they kept having accidents and they didn’t have the staff to keep taking them to the toilet so reverted back to nappies then the window of opportunity was lost.

Bloody hell. It makes you wonder what they eat normally. Pizza, chips, nuggets, sandwiches?

When my kids were tiny we had a health visitor who did developmental checks every so often. That was one way we knew they were supposed to be toilet trained long before school, but frankly we didn't need to be told! We were keen to get out of the whole nasty business of having to buy nappies, change them and dispose of them. How on earth has it happened that some parents claim not to know that it's their responsibility to toilet train their children, long before school age? Didn't they get toilet trained themselves?

How did they eat lunch if you couldnt get them into the hall?

There is middle ground between being strict and being gentle. Children need boundaries, they need to know they’re loved by not the most important person in the world, we all have to behave a certain way.

I think you need to talk to your feeder pre-schools! Every nursery/pre-school I know teaches them to put their coats on using the flip method, to hang up their coats, to recognise their names and to say please/thank you.

I actually have a theory that the reason potty training is becoming later on average and more difficult is because modern nappies are too good and too comfortable.

They're fantastic for young babies of course and it's wonderful that we have the technology.

BUT they're comfortable, unlike old fashioned terry cloth nappies. This means that there's much less motivation for older children to learn to stop using them. Children are resistant to stopping them, because there's much less motivation.

If they weren't as comfortable children would be prompted to potty train much earlier.