First week back to school this week, and by Friday morning DD (8) is saying she feels sick. It’s a fairly common occurrence in the mornings before school, I’ve always been someone who has some slight nausea in the mornings as well so the general rule has always been that unless there’s actual signs of illness, she has to try and make it into school. DD had stayed at her dads the night before so he let me know, I spoke to DD and she went into school.
By lunchtime I get a call off school saying she’s quite upset saying she still feels unwell, stomach ache, etc. Off I go to pick her up and she’s clearly okay once I’ve got her in the car. I’ve always thought DD is a highly sensitive person (as am I) very big emotions, struggles with loud noises, big crowds and what not. So I chat to her in the car about what’s wrong and after a while she says she’s feeling nervous and worried about her new teacher and being back in school, so we chat about that and how I understand it can be a big change but the only way to work through those feelings is to stay in school and you’ll settle in quicker. She understands but starts crying.
Once home she has her lunch whilst i finish off the work I had to do, and she spends a couple hours with my gardening. After tea I’ve allowed her to play out for a couple of hours.
Her dad dropped round to drop off something he forgot to pack in her bag, saw that she was out and then went ballistic at me on the phone later. How if she was at his house and she had “lied” about being unwell she would have been grounded, that she’s “playing me”, she’ll be pulling this sort of stuff all the time now because she knows she can get away with it and I’m letting her play out because I don’t want to have to deal with her.
I said back that I can’t prove she’s lying, I have no doubt she probably was feeling unwell for the reasons she said and I have no reason to doubt her. And that if I’m grounding her for feeling unwell at school, what’s going to be the punishment when she actually does something serious?
Admittedly I probably am a bit softer with DD, but her Dad shouts at her a lot about things that aren’t that big a deal IMO, if he thinks she’s messing about or even just this week he’s shouted at her in-front of me for taking too long to get in the car and blocking the pavement when people are trying to get past, and being “fussy” about what she wants in her packed lunch.
School have spoken to me about her attendance in previous years, it’s always around 93 or 94%, which they want to be higher, but with her last report she is doing better than the average expected standard in 8/12 of her subjects, and doing as expected in the other 4 and got a glowing report from her teacher.
id love to know how you would have handled this and whether it would be something you would have grounded your child for?