2yo not coping with starting nursery

[Peaplant20]

Hi all

My 2yo just started nursery two weeks ago and she is extremely unhappy about it. She did settling sessions and was totally fine and happy until they became longer in length and then a switch flipped.

Shes distraught when we leave her there, staying longer just prolongs it and we are unable to calm her down by staying longer. She’s upset the whole time she is there - the first full day she did she did not eat a single thing. The second full day was this week and she caved in by dinner and ate some pasta which is her favourite. They also said she was happier in the day this time but she was still distraught at drop off and when I collected her she looked like she had been very upset and she seemed so anxious and on edge like I’ve never seen before.

It’s now affecting non-nursery days too. She gets really really upset going to my mum’s and my MiLs (who each look after her a day a week), even though she’s always loved going there and never had an issue at all. When we’re at home she keeps saying “not going to nursery today” as if she’s trying to check and get reassurance that it’s not a nursery day.

I know it’s only been two weeks but I’m really upset for her. I knew drop offs would be hard but I didn’t realise she’d be upset all day and also on non-nursery days too.

Does anyone have any experience of this? We’ve bought her story books about nursery, I’ve got photos of nursery staff on my phone so we can look at them and talk about the staff members, they’ve made her a collage with family photos at nursery to talk about. What else can I do? It’s a really lovely nursery, we looked at a lot in the area and it was by far the nicest one, all the other children seem
happy and all the staff are really nice too.

Hey, I know every child is different, but it does get better. We had this exact same situation. Didn’t help that he was a covid baby so spent the first 2 years of his life pretty much just with me and DH. Settling in days at nursery were great, and his key worker praised how wonderfully he did. But once it was a full day, we also had tears and more tears.
It broke my heart a little to know that I was sending him in unhappy, but I also knew that he would eventually learn and settle. He couldn’t stay at home everyday, he needed to learn to play with others and experience life away from home; and I needed my time and also to get back to work. We would get the cries of ‘I hate nursery’ and ‘I don’t want to go’ but we stuck with it. Is there anything that she really enjoys at home that nursery could incorporate? For us it was vehicles. So they would distract him with vehicles and colouring vehicles and talking about vehicles. Some days it worked, others it didn’t but it was a progress.
As his understanding got better, i made a weekly calendar so he knew exactly what was going on that week and which days he had nursery. We also explained that he went to nursery as mummy and daddy had to work and make money, and with the money we make, we are able to have fun days out. No nursery = no fun days out.
Having no tears at drop off took a while to stop. A lot longer than I expected. Even when I saw photos of him having fun, he would still cry at drop off. But it does get batter and he now loves it. In fact he told me today that he wasn’t ready to go home and wanted to stay and I should leave 🙈 Good luck and stick with it. Be excited about nursery on their behalf and keep highlighting going!!

You have done better than me! My daughter only lasted 2 weeks and I gave up. From what I've read it does get easier for them. Mine wasn't going in for long enough for it to make much difference to my day or hers so I'm going to leave it until she's older.

I hope she settles soon for you and it gets better.

I took mine home again. She was traumatised by her experience, wouldn’t let me leave her side even for a second when at home and clung to me like a baby monkey. The following year, aged 3, she started and thrived. None of my other children started age 2.

@AtalantaX I'm glad to read this as I felt like I gave up too easily!

@CCW14 this is really helpful to know thank you.

@KylieKangaroo and @AtalantaX gosh I’m really sorry you both went through that! I’m going to give it a full month and see how things are rhen as nursery say she’s making progress. I don’t really have an easy way to stop now as I’m a teacher so I can’t suddenly drop my hours back down again as there will be no one to teach my classes so I don’t think they’d actually let me. We’ve alot going on at home right now, FIL going through cancer treatment and two trips abroad for weddings so i do wonder if she’s picking up on all the change and that’s making it hard for her too. We don’t have many friends with children so I thought nursery would be a great place to make some friends.