Am I overthinking this nursery situation?

[Peppapig24]

Name change as regular poster and because I'm probably just being daft!

DS is 2, absolute whirlwind never sat still, even wriggles in his sleep!
Since nursery Tuesday he's managed to fall over and bump his head on a wooden toy and also fallen at the park. Both of these have resulted in a bruise. Nursery messaged this morning asking what had happened so they could do an incident form.
Now I'm stressing they think a. I'm a shit mum. B. Need to send something off to safeguarding?
I mean bar wrapping up in Cotten wool am I in the wrong to let my DS be a child and run around? I was there for both incidents but I can't catch him in a split second.
I don't know if I'm just worrying for nothing.

They have to ask - it will just be recorded on a form. They comes across this millions of times a day. They also need to chow it didn’t happen with them.

As long as you tell them when you drop him off what he has done then it should be fine. It’s the unexplained / hidden bruises that can get the alarm bells dinging

As the mother of a fellow child who injures themselves frequently, don’t stress. They have to keep a record of injuries but usually they will just brush it off as a genuine accident. DS injured himself just as much as nursery as he did at home so they knew he was genuinely accident prone. I got 3 accident forms in one day from nursery once 🙈

When I went to sign the ‘home injury’ form one day in the office I said I’m surprised he doesn’t have a whole file to himself and they said ‘believe it or not he’s not the worst one!’

In my mothers words ‘that child has never walked, he’s always runs’ 🤣

He has now been diagnosed with ADHD

They will only suspect abuse/neglect if you don’t tell them about injures/try to cover it up or if your explanation doesn’t match the injury. A bruise on the forehead and you saying he ran into a bench at the park makes perfect sense. In safeguarding training you are taught hat the usual pattern of injuries for a normal child playing like a child are (bruises on shins etc) and what is likely to be abuse.

They are simply protecting themselves - all child carers have always made me fill out forms when they notice something to cover their own back in case they are blamed.

Also if the child is being abused, they can show the bruises were happening at home.

As a teacher, I know that kids get into scrapes and have falls. My kids equally are covered in bruises. As am I.

Im glad they are vigilant and notice. They will hopefully catch out the bad parents who are doing it. They don’t think that’s you from 2 bruises!

They are just keeping a record, and getting you to sign it off as caused outside the setting in case you did try to say it happened there at any point.

If your child went in with suspicious bruising on arms or torso repeatedly then they would need to speak to someone about safe guarding as a duty of care, but it won't be for the odd bump which children inevitably get.

It's just procedure. My son scratched under his eye around the same age in his sleep, quite deep, and I had to sign an incident form for it, nothing else ever happened or said.

As others have said, please tell the nursery at drop off about any bruises etc. I can’t describe the feeling when you see a bump or bruise (particularly a bad one) that you had no idea about and have no idea if it happened under your care - you should know and that’s what makes it scary. the staff will absolutely not judge you for this - they’re the experts in how clumsy children can be they’ll see it daily! They just need to know it wasn’t done at nursery and they don’t need to explain it to you!

Summed up my child to a tee.

they’re not looking for abuse but they note it down incase it gets worse and it show they don’t do it

my 2 yo is a bull in a china shop. Every day he has a new bruise (not quite but still 😂)

it’s his normal behaviour in nursery too. This week he jumped off a (small) slide headfirst and bruised his head. He also sat on a chair and missed resulting in another mark 😂

they are trained to spot abuse and they’ll know what a “common” injury is against a sign of abuse

Standard procedure. I often have to sign “home incident forms” at my 2yo’s nursery- they write “noticed bruise on leg during nappy change”, there’s a section that says “cause” and I either write “unknown” or “toddler playing” or if I happen to know what happened (unlikely!) then I write that, then sign it.

It’s so I can’t take her home then ring them and say there’s a bruise on her leg and it must’ve happened at Nursery.

They have to inform you if they are lodging a safeguarding. Plus they never would for something so minor / if they did the sw would not escalate (wife of a sw)

I had a week when ds had a black eye, bite mark and the following week fell out of a hammock and had ? Broken finger. Admittedly all done in nursery but still looked pretty bad walking about!

My DS had three head bumps in quick succession but I proactively told nursery about them. By the third time I fully expected a SS well-being check! But it never happened. They would be most welcome though if they ever wanted to check us. i felt awful even though most of them happened with his dad.

DS now comes home with an accident report for every nursery session at the moment. I think he is quite a gung ho kid. His sister is little miss health and safety and so careful and cautious.

DS is still going strong and absolutely fine for anyone worried!

I took my daughter in on Friday, her last day was Tuesday. In that time we'd had a visit to AnE and a separate first aider visit in a shop. Nothing like this has ever happened before and happened in 2 consecutive days. I had to fill out an incident form just to say she'd come in with the bump wasn't anything to do with them. It's normal x

My old nursery was like this . My youngest is constantly full of bumps and bruises and he was there for an entire year before they suddenly started questioning me over every single bruise . It started giving me anxiety and I half expected social services to reach out but they never did . I later found out that another child ( age 4) came forward to their key worker about abuse at home 😔 . This all happened the same time my child suddenly started being questioned so the nursery must have been taking extra precautions after dealing with that . Anyway, in the end it mounted to nothing and my child is now in school (still with hundreds of bruises).

My DS age 4 is very like this. Full of energy and always on the move and has always been a bit accident prone. Multiple occasions we have had to sign the nursery form. As others have mentioned they have to document it to prove it didn’t happen in their care. If he was injured at nursery you would sign an accident form to confirm what happened whilst there. Honestly don’t worry, accidents happen and children are very resilient!

My kids nursery is much more subtle about the asking. They’ll just mention it at drop off, or pick up if they only noticed it later, and ask what happened. My own safeguarding training from my previous job that involved young kids and babies, certainly wouldn’t have been worried by what you described on your child. People in child care know what’s normal for children’s injuries and what you’ve described won’t be ringing alarm bells for them. They just have to tick the boxes…

God definitely don't stress, I had to explain to nursery that when she said "the big pink tube in the bath hurt my bum" it's because she sat on a bath toy. We also had a school xall from the safeguarding lead because she told them "daddy strangled me" (he didn't it was a tickling game but I was MORTIFIED)
As a heads up, I'd tell them when you do drop off if he has noticeable bumps, bruises or cuts - they note it down and then everyone has record if its ever flagged by yourself or a staff member at a later date (they just need to know so if you call up and say "has someone hit my son, he has a bruised head" they can say "it's the bruise we discussed") Likewise, they'll give you an accudent/incident slip for every teeny tiny accident at nursery - it's a pain but it's the rules for safeguarding.

Don’t worry. We had at least one accident form a week (sometime 3 a week) for 3 1/2 nursery years, for my whirlwind high speed accident prone child ( also a constant wiggler).
After a month or two they stoped asking about any home bruises as they could see what she was like 😂 . At one point she had 19 separate bruises and I felt mortified in case anyone felt I was neglecting her, but usually the response was “I’m surprised she’s not got more!”

Nursery need to do a form so that you can’t say he did it there, that’s all. It’s normal for children that age to bruise and they know that. Things like this wouldn’t trigger any safeguarding procedures. Bruises alone aren’t an issue, it’s regular consistent unexplained bruises in strange places where children wouldn’t normally bruise that would cause any issues. A bruise on the knee or forehead from falling over is par for the course with toddlers and nursery staff know that, because they do safeguarding training.

We discovered that one of our sons and his chum were bareback riding the heifers in the field at the side of our house, they even had a stopwatch to check who could stay on for the longest. We were good parents children get up to all sorts.

Normal. I had to fill in a form for all of my twins’ home injuries.

Nursery are simply going through the procedure to cover their own back. They will know what sort of a child he is and what sort of mum you are... not a s..t one. Chil!l he's fine and he is 2. Enjoy.

It’s to keep a record that the injury didn’t occur on the site - staff will be trying to figure out if something happened in their care if they just spot a bruise. In the longer term if there was ever any concerns over your child the accident forms might be looked at for patterns of injury. This isn’t a thing for normal bumps and it will just be filed but it is there for safeguarding or even health for example if a child kept getting same type of injury they might need ears checked, limb issues etc.