My ds1 (3yrs) has been attending this nursery for 6 months now. Attends twice a week. Moved from Australia, so was a big change. Took a couple of months for him to stop crying at drop off. Now he doesn’t cry.
BUT he always is adamant that he doesn’t want to go, gets really upset every morning when we’re trying to get him ready to go. On other non-nursery days he will similarly say things like “I don’t want to go to nursery”, or ask “are we going to nursery? I don’t want to go to nursery” when we’re getting ready to go out somewhere.
Every time I pick him up I ask the carers how he’s been and they tell me he’s had a great day, plays well with the other kids, enjoys the activities etc. I have mentioned a few times that hes been upset about coming to nursery every morning, which seems to surprise the carers. Have spoken to a few different carers about it and they all say the same things and have the same response.
This morning he was really upset about going. I tried to question him about why he didn’t like it. After 5-10 minutes of him saying “it’s scary” he then said that a particular worker was scary. Another 5 minutes of probing and I asked him “does she talk loudly? Does she hit you?” And he said “she hit me on the face”.
It’s very possible that he was just agreeing with my leading questions. I was making suggestions because he just wasn’t providing any reasons as to why it was scary at all.
For context, he finds a lot of things scary eg going to monkey music if it’s too loud he says it’s scary. We had to leave a show at Disneyland because he found it scary (when he was 2).
I then told him that if he didn’t like this nursery that was fine we could find him a new one. He said no, didn’t want to change to a different one, several times.
So now I don’t know what to think. This nursery is a ofsted outstanding rated nursery, came highly recommended by another mum. When I go I get a really good feeling about the staff. The other children seem very happy. When I pick ds1 up he’s happy, doesn’t cry, isn’t desperate to leave.
I honestly don’t think she would have hit him. Maybe she can come across a bit scary to him, entirely possible as he’s a sensitive soul. But I feel like I shouldn’t ignore what he’s saying and how he’s feeling.
What should I do?
Thanks for reading my long post!