Dd came home with scratch on her face

[Springsunshine28]

My little one came home from nursery with a deep scratch on her face, very close to her eye. She told us that one of her classmates was responsible. She often tells us that this same child pushes, pulls, and hurts her during nursery time. We've encouraged her to speak up and to tell the grown-ups and to let the child know that she doesn’t like that kind of behaviour.

After this incident with the scratch, I raised the issue with the nursery. The key worker for her age group said she hadn’t seen this child go near mine. She also mentioned that children often blame this particular child, even when it's not clear he’s responsible, and they’re not sure why he gets blamed so often.

She assured me they would look into it, and reminded my daughter to always tell an adult if something like this happens again. She also said she’d speak to the other child about using gentle hands. However, she added that the older children (3–4 year olds) typically don’t mind this kind of behaviour and therefore don’t usually speak up about it.

I’m left wondering, am I overreacting for bringing this up? Or is it reasonable to expect a bit more vigilance and follow-up when a child gets hurt?

Considering other children also comment on the things one child is doing to them, then it sounds like the staff aren't being at all vigilant as to what's going on, and if they're not sure why he's always getting the blame for things then maybe they should be watching him more!

This is tricky when staff don’t see what’s happened / don’t address it in the moment with kids involved as you can’t get the full picture retrospectively from children that age.

YANBU to raise it with them and ask questions, but their response is fair enough in the sense that they will ‘look in to it’ (probably speak to both children) and probably just keep an eye on their relationship going forward.

As it stands though, they probably won’t “do” anything about it.

Kids are clumsy, there have been many occasions where my DD was hurt by another child, not necessarily on purpose. One time they were waving some branches in the air and my DD moved forward and a kid happened to lower the stick and she had a massive red bruised up mark across her face. Looked horrific and even though she said ‘so and so did it!’ And I automatically assumed they did it on purpose, after a strongly worded email to the nursery (as nobody told me at the time) I had a chat with the staff and they advised it wasn’t foul play, just an accident and that they addressed the whole class to say you have to be more aware of each other.

In a roundabout way, sometimes kids get caught between toys, emotions etc and it may come across as something more sinister.