A couple of days ago I had a call from nursery saying that my 3yo son had hit a pregnant woman in the stomach. I was obviously appalled and in disbelief, and they told me that one of the mums was walking past him and for no reason he hit her in the stomach, hard enough to hurt her. He couldn't tell them why he'd done it - he wasn't having a tantrum, want angry, didn't know her etc...
When I collected him I explained how wrong it was to do this and asked him again why he'd done it. He said he didn't know, but did appear genuinely sorry that he'd hurt her. I got him to make a card to give her - she was physically fine, thank god.
We're both devastated by what he's done and wondering how to deal with it - it's so out of the blue. He's had incidents of hitting children at the nursery but these have decreased significantly in the past 6 months. Nursery have recently had problems with his behaviour in terms of him not listening and refusing to do as he's told, and finding a suitable consequence that would have an impact as he's not bothered by most of their punishments. He was assessed a while ago by a SEN expert, who deemed there to be no real issues but gave some (very obvious) suggestions to the nursery to implement. Most of these we already practiced at home.
While he's attention seeking at home, he doesn't display the aggressive behaviour that nursery reports, so it's hard for us to understand the reason. The thing is, he really enjoys nursery and is always keen to see his friends, so it's not that he's unhappy.
We've requested a meeting with them to try and get to the bottom of this and understand what's going on. Should we request another SEN assessment?