I have a three year old who goes to nursery 4 days a week. In general I really like the nursery but there is one member of staff who works in my son’s room and I think she has a real issue with him, and that her expectations for his behaviour aren’t fair.
I think it’s relevant to include that my son is very tall for his age, easily the height of a child who is a year or two older, and he’s also very articulate. I know it sounds like a brag and I’m sorry, but it’s just because I think it’s a contributing factor to this situation. He speaks like a five year old, i.e. completely fluently and in complex and grammatically correct sentences. He has other areas where he struggles - by no means do I think he’s abnormally gifted or talented, just that in this one particular area he’s ahead of the curve.
Anyway, to the main point - several times in the last few weeks this one staff member has spoken to me at pick-up about her concerns. These include the following:
- twice in the last 5/6 weeks my son (who has been potty trained for over a year) has had accidents at nursery. I’m not sure why as I can’t remember the last time he had an accident while at home, but in any event I don’t think it’s a big deal for a three year old to have an occasional accident. However, this staff member has said to me ‘we need to solve this as he cant keep deciding it’s better to pee himself than use the toilet. He has to learn there are consequences for not using the loo’.
- there was an incident where another child, who is nearly a year older than my son, hit my son and my son hit him back. Neither child was hurt. I would of course expect the nursery to deal with this in the moment and then let me know for info, but when this staff member told me she said ‘your son has got to learn to control himself, he’s so much bigger than [older child] that he could really hurt him’. Which I appreciate is the case and I expect the nursery to manage children’s behaviour so that they don’t get hurt, but this is the first time my son has hit another child, and there didn’t seem to be any acknowledgment of the fact that the other child hit him first and is much older.
- my son will sometimes scream when he’s very frustrated or is asked to do something. We’ve been working on this a lot as I appreciate it’s a pain to listen to. When it happens at home we help him regulate and then discuss / model how he can express his feelings better. This approach has been really successful - the screaming happens very rarely now. But this staff member has spoken to me twice to indicate that it’s a serious issue and that ‘because he can express himself clearly when he’s frustrated we know he is just choosing not to, and that’s not good’. I don’t think it’s fair to characterise it this way. He can often express his emotions clearly but he is still only 3 and I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect him to have mastered impulse control and self discipline, or to view this as him being deliberately difficult just because sometimes he can clearly articulate why something has upset him.
- this is more minor but adds context - three times I have had to correct her that he is three not four, and on one of those occasions she asked me what year he was born as though she thought I had miscalculated his age or something.
AIBU and PFB to feel that this woman has unreasonable expectations of my son? He’s clearly far from perfect because he’s 3 and still learning how to be a human, but I feel like she expects so much more from him than one would usually expect from a 3yo. I want to speak to the nursery manager to address it but I want a sense check first in case I need to hear that he is unique among 3 year olds in behaving in these ways!