Child not settling

[KatieJ662]

Hi All, I hope you can offer some friendly advice.

My LO has just turned 2 and has moved rooms at nursery from the baby room to the toddler room. In the baby room she had an amazing bond with her key worker and has not taken well to moving rooms and new staff.
I have today had a meeting with nursery to discuss. They say she's very unhappy and on edge for a lot of the day, crying for mummy and not being comforted by cuddles in the same way most of the other children are. They believe she has a fear of the particular room she is in, because it is noisier, busier with people coming and going and every time someone comes in and out she gets upset. I think it's a fear of being abandoned and generally feeling unsafe. In other words, it is the environment not the people in general as she is much happier outside where she can also see her old keyworker. It is not possible for her to be in a different room.
We've decided to add an extra day (so she does 3 days total per week) as well as shorter days in an attempt to help her settle quicker and feel more secure. She takes a comforter toy, and will soon take some of my clothes with her.

I'm finding it very difficult to see her so miserable, and don't want to jump to another nursery and just have the same problem again. Does anyone have any suggestions please?

This is very much just my thoughts, but my little one settled much easier with a childminder. She now goes to a childminder who is a mum herself, but with grown up kids, and only has my DD and one other child a day to look after (max she will have is three kids). It's such a quiet, calm environment that when I spent afternoons there settling in I started wishing I could go there too! It's a lovely home. And my DD has got annoyed at pickup before because she wants to stay there rather than come home 🙄

All that is to say, that I would listen to your child. My last childcare place I always had a niggling feeling that it wasn't right for her. There were scowls from her at drop off, and she would be totally overstimulated/seem exhausted and shouty after each day.

She comes back from her current childminders calm and chilled and smiling. I've been shocked at the difference.

Could you interview a couple of local childminders and or other nurseries and see if you get a good feeling about any of them?

Is there any chance of the key worker moving rooms even fora little bit of each day?

My dd had this going from room 2 to room 3 (out of 4) at her nursery. She really, really struggled even to the point of mild self harm (scratching till drawing blood). She'd previously been so happy in rooms 1 and 2. It was a dark time for us, maybe the hardest period of parenting I've ever had (so far...!)

We got through it with some really close communication between us and nursery, who tried lots of strstegies till things got better, which they did, in just a couple of weeks.

My concern from your post is that the nursery isn't making suggestions of solutions, only presenting you with the problem.

Our solutions were totally unique to my dd but fwiw, they were as follows.

Dd doesn't like noise or bustle so they gave her a quiet corner with a chair in it, and that was her quiet corner to retreat to when overwhelmed. We changed which clothes she wore (no zips or hoods) as she was hurting herself fiddling with the zips till her skin bled, and she'd hide this under her hood. She was given helpful "jobs" to do like tidying up, which cheered her up. I insisted that the staff check for scratches frequently, as once, they'd left her with blood on her neck which dried there, it had been hidden under a hood. She didn't like being greeted in the morning with a hug, so they greeted her with a personalised "Hello Name" song which she preferred. After a couple of weeks of these strategies, things got way better and she never scratched herself any more. She loved going in after that. The song thing in particular was such a breakthru, I've posted on it on MN before.

Then when it was time to transition from room 3 to room 4, they over-planned it like a military operation, with settling sessions starting months before, starting with just a few minutes at a time. (Unlike the rest of the class who just transitioned with a single half day settle the week of the move!) It worked totally fine, no issues.

That's how the nursery ought to be dealing with it.