Does anyone else's 6 year old or thereabouts cry if there is a change of routine?

[Enideepmidwinter]

dd1 does. She cried on Friday because everyone was wearing their normal clothes not school uniform. she cried today because the children had to meet at church, not school. Even though she could see all her friends sitting in a group she was petrified and clung to me white and shaking.

The school had to ring me once when they picked her to do a science experiment with the older children. she had to blow into a tube in water to see what would happen. she wouldn't blow into the tube, had a complete fit, went white with fear and became hysterical. The teacher said she 'hadn't ever seen anything like it'.

Surely this can't be 'normal' behaviour? She is very confident with her peers and when being sporty.

yes, my 2 go bonkers over a change in routine!!

ds1 is a creature of habit. I moan at his apparant lack of a sense of adventure but it might just be his age.

do they cry though? does it really upset them?

Has she always been like this, or has something happened recently that has made her particularly anxious?

no she has always been like it

she was worse as a baby/toddler

No, my 6 yo is not like this, but I can think of at least one child in his class who is prone to freak out at unexpected occurrences.

My ds lives live on a fairly even keel, so any kind of additional change or excitement is a welcome diversion. This other little girl (the dd of good friends of ours) lives life at much more of an emotional pitch, and can be thrown by things I'd expect my children to be able to cope with. So if my children don't like an item of food I'd expect them to discreetly leave it on the edge of their plates, whereas this child carries on as if I'd put a live cobra in front of her. Then again, even my easy-going ds adamantly refused the (non-speaking) part of Joseph in the Christmas eve mass, despite having quite a big part in the school nativity play, which he coped with very well. And my dd1 at a similar age went through a phase of hysterically insisting she needed the loo even when she'd been five minutes previously, which drove me nearly insane.

There's no particular rhyme or reason to most of these things. We all want to see our children coping happily with the things life throws at them, and it's hard to see them struggling. But I think that as they mature emotionally and neurologically, these sorts of odd incidents do iron themselves out. It can help to sit them down at a non-emotional moment and have a little chat about it, along the lines of, "Well, you know you find X difficult, so we need to try and think about how you're going to feel when we do Y". But in the end like most things, it will probably pass as long as they aren't rewarded for these displays with too much attention and anxiety.

was it you who I suggested look at the Elaine Aaron book (highly sensitive child?)

this may be useful too

DS doesn't cope with a change of routine well either. He is very set in his ways. Wanted to wear his school uniform to the Halloween disco because he was going to school. Wanted to wear his school uniform today because he is going to the childminder (first day at CM since end of term). There are also more serious examples.

I don't think he gets it as badly as your DD by the sound of it though. Although something he does that I find odd is if he watches a DVD he cries when it ends. I put him the school play DVD on with the older children's pantomime showing and left him and DD while I sneaked off upstairs to hoover (DD scared of hoover) and he was stood at the bottom of the stairs in floods of tears - DD had pressed mute.

Your dd does sound very similar to my friend's little girl. I know her parents have found it quite hard to deal with, and have hypothesised all sorts of reasons for her behaviour, including birth trauma etc. But it does seem to be improving as she gets older and grows into herself a bit more. Was it your dd who was having difficulty with schoolwork, too? Cos friend's dd was in a similar position, though wrt to maths rather than literacy, and they've found that doing Kumon with her (maths and english) has really helped. Something to do with the enormous amount of repetition and the fact that the work is always pitched to be at a level she can comfortably cope with. Parents reckon that the extra confidence in schoolwork has had very positive effects on her behaviour and general calmness.

I always need to prepare ds in advance for any changes in his routine. He likes to have a map for walking trips etc so he knows what is coming and how long. He doesn't always cry outwardly but can vocalise his internal distress and chokes me up. Physically he tenses up and can withdraw or become aggressive.

Does she try new activities willingly or do you face a battle beforehand even though you know she'll enjoy it when she gets there?

I think I was a lot like this when I was a child, Enid. I got hysterical once at school because I thought I'd forgotten to brush my teeth in the morning. I did grow out of it.

DS1 has a bad track record at coping with changes of routine but we go over the top to explain all forthcoming routine changes well in advance, and he's actually not too bad nowadays.

No, Enid, I didn't think it was attention-seeeking behaviour, and didn't mean to give that impression that it was down to your lifestyle.

What I meant was that everybody seems to have an inbuilt comfort level for new, potentially stressful situations, and that a child whose inbuilt comfort level is quite low can overload on things that seem completely unexceptional to outsiders. I do think it's at least partly a maturational thing, since as they get older their ability to predict and process uncertainty improves.

I'm sorry if you felt I was being dismissive -- what I means was that although your dd's reactions are quite extreme, it still sounds like the end of a spectrum of reactiveness rather than something unique to her.

Enid, we do have probs with ds when things don't happen as planned or expected, often resulting in tantrums rather than really upset tears.

School has had trouble when his teacher has PPA time, and the supply teacher or teaching assistant takes over. We now have photo's of all the staff involved with him, and I have a timetable so I can prepare him the night before.
Another flashpoint has been when Daddy unexpectedly collects him from CM. Now we ring with 1/2 an hours warning if the plan has changed.

I have found reading this book helps me a lot.

It has sections on children who are more sensitive to change. Worth a look, I think.

PS this thread has made me feel better about ds.

my friend Maggie rang this morning and was telling me about her ds (young year 3 so possibly just 7) absolutely going mad because she'd bought new settees - he was leaving home and everything because of it!! My ds hates it when I get my hair cut or wear make up (every day) because it makes me look ugly!

Sorry, rogue apostrophe on photos

I don't think so jammy

she does know about the baby but she has always been like this. She is fine at home but things like having her photo taken (she HATES it), changes in routine, doing new stuff at school all panic her.

We have been having a great time together at home, getting on really well, lots of cuddles and chats etc recently. Just that the changes in routine don't seem to be getting easier to bear.

Easy your post rang a bell with me. DS was quite upset on the morning of his school play because DH and I had the morning off. So I took DD to nursery but he stayed at home until it was time to go to school rather than going to the CMs as he usually does when DD goes to nursery.

He also used to have trouble when DH was working away - odd, random nights. But DH always sits him down the night before/that morning and explains that he is taking his suitcase to work (was only 3 when we started doing this) and now DS will ask him where he is going and he handles it much better.

This could have been dd2 at six, Enid. She sometimes cried and sometimes constantly cross-questioned me about whatever it was that had changed and seemed unable to believe my reassurances. Sometimes she would refocus on something else, eg we were living in Indonesia at the time of the first Bali bomb. Dd never mentioned anything about the explosion but instead became convinced a volcano might appear then erupt in the school playing fields!

It's hard to deal with, having to constantly explain and reassure and justify all of life's changes. But the passage of time has helped dd and her wobbles are fewer nowadays, though we are about to move abroad again so I'm prepared for some regression, esp as she has begun stammering again.

Any updates ladies your children how are they ? X