Good Good-Byes: Notes for the First Days of School

The start of school can be filled with mixed emotions for both grown ups and children. Here are some Tips for Good Good-Byes:

• Talk to your child beforehand about what to expect. Meet the teachers and ask questions at the visiting day. Look at the calendars in this email and use that information to talk to your child about the classroom and what to expect. Talk about your teachers and use their names often, if your child sees you as liking and trusting of the teacher, they are more likely to build their own trust faster.

• Be on time. It is hard to come into a full room that is already in full swing. It's also when everyone else will be there doing the same thing.

• Greet your teachers at the door and then say "good-bye". Keep your good-bye brief. I know this is hard especially if your child is crying, but you want to show your child that you are confident that they will be safe and have fun. If you prolong the good-bye it can make them feel less certain/secure.

• If it goes great, keep the same routine on day 2!

• What if it doesn't go well? Follow the plan above and leave your child with the teacher. We are no strangers to tears. They usually calm down quickly once the caregiver is no longer in sight. If they don't your teacher will call you and discuss a plan of action for day 2.

• What if I am sad? First days can be hard whether they go well and your child gleefully bounces off with the teacher or they are rough and you say good-bye to a crying child. Don't be shocked if you feel like crying too. It is normal, but try to save it for when your child can't see you.

• The teachers have done this before and they have seen it all. We will absolutely be in contact if there are any issues and we expect surprises (sometime the child that seems the most ready at visiting day is the most reluctant on day one). We are ready with extra teaching hands on deck in these first few days to make sure every child gets the support they need for a successful start to school.

The BIG importance of the Everyday things. Revisited from an older post.

As parents we are constantly playing offense as we respond to the joys and trials of parenting in real-time: illnesses, injuries, school placement, peer issues, and now COVID. Things change and we adapt on a daily, or even hourly, basis. That is why it is so helpful to have a defensive plan for three of the most important areas for your family’s overall health and wellness: sleep, nutrition, and exercise. Treating sleep, nutrition, and exercise as a priority for yourself and your child will help keep you all in the best possible shape to be able to respond to life’s unexpected hurdles.

Sleep is the most important factor in a person’s overall health. Disrupted sleep is one of the first signs something is not going well with our bodies. Disrupted sleep also has the most impact on every other system of the body. It impacts our mental health, our cardiovascular health, and our metabolic health. If a child is suddenly experiencing unusual behaviors, irritability, or health symptoms, I encourage parents to look at their child’s sleep pattern for clues, as sleep disturbances are so often the cause of many of our ailments.

Nutrition is also extremely important as it impacts your body’s overall health and ability to fight off illness and disease. It is important to consider ahead of time how your family will talk about eating healthy and how you will work to ensure your family has a healthy, balanced meal plan. In today’s fast-paced world, we often substitute convenience for health. Having a plan in place that ensures you don’t have to be thinking about this everyday will help save you time in the long run. Children may naturally be disinclined to eat certain foods. They are more sensitive to consistency and flavors than we are as adults. The key is to keep introducing/offering, without pressure, a variety of foods to your child. Like all things, they will get better with practice and expand the repertoire of enjoyable foods (how many times did you have to try brussels sprouts before you started to like them?). A common refrain of nutritionists is that a child has to be exposed to a new flavor at least 30 times if you want them to learn to like it. Of course, in addition to variety, we want to ensure our children are not being overexposed to processed foods, and things with high sugar and salt contents. Young children do not fatigue in their ability to tolerate sweet and salty the same way adults do (their internal sensors that tell them they have “had enough” just aren’t developed yet), so they require parents to let them know when they have had too much of a good thing. As adults, we need to know how much is too much, so we can teach them good portion control as well. Language shared with us by a nutrition consultant referred to “sometimes foods” and “anytime foods”—your teachers often use the language “growing food” to refer to foods like fruits, veggies and proteins!

Exercise is the last piece to the puzzle. Unlike nutrition, where children really need our help to learn what is healthy, we can really follow our child’s lead when it comes to exercise. Children’s need to run and play and explore will meet their bodies’ need for exercise. It is our job to save space and time for them to be able to meet their natural demand for vigorous movement. We need to protect school recess and physical education. We need to make sure that we save time each day to let our children run and explore. We are often the obstacle to children getting enough exercise as we build lives that are increasingly over-scheduled.

Taking time to think about these three issues and to ensure your family is maintaining a lifestyle where sleep, nutrition, and exercise are valued priorities will ensure that you are able to impart your family beliefs in these areas on to your children. These are areas that, if protected and valued, will make it easier for your child to face the world and its daily hurdles.

Why do we Halloween with Preschoolers?

There are some things in life that just aren’t meant for the preschool age, and yet, they permeate our culture in a way that they can not be avoided. Halloween is a perfect example. You can’t escape Halloween, with scary store displays and house decorations and children’s costumes that are more violent in theme than maybe they should be. But, there are ways to approach Halloween that may make the holiday more appropriate for this younger age group:

1. Don’t be surprised if they just aren’t that into it. Being able to have rich pretend play develops between 3 and 4, so preschoolers may have a hard time determining what is real and pretend. Even a friendly costume may be scary to a child that is not fully able to tell real from pretend. Pretend play is a developed skill and recognizing what is real and what is pretend is something we can actually teach our children. There are many books written just for this purpose.

2. Prepare them for experiences. There are lots of great read-aloud books about Halloween. You can also describe for your youngest children what trick-or-treating will look like and what kind of costumes they may see. While they may have already been around for a few Halloweens at this point, they likely do not recall what last year was like (those long-term memories don’t really start forming until around 4 years old), so assume this will be like their first Halloween again.

3. Practice, practice, practice. Look for events that are designed for the younger crowd (like Trunk or Treat) so they can practice putting on their costumes with other people in less scary environments. Let them wear their costume at other times and have them practice saying “trick or treat” and “thank you” just like you do with “please”. At school we try to practice some of the activities that we know they will do in elementary school—in our own preschool kind of way.

4. Focus on stuff that makes sense to them. You can focus on the costumes and activities that are familiar to them. At this age, they know what blood is, so you can mention that and talk about real and fake. They probably don’t know what a vampire or ghost is—and there are too many other concepts that won’t make as much sense to them if you try to explain because there are too many underlying concepts that they haven’t learned yet to be able to “get it”. There are lots of stories about monsters and witches, so they may have general ideas about these things, but part of what makes this a tricky holiday for our preschoolers is that there is a lot of stuff happening they may not understand. Please know that generally children ignore things that don’t make much sense to them. They don’t really attach emotion to something they don’t understand, we actually do that for them when we say things like, “ooh, vampire, that’s scary”. You can also switch the focus beyond costumes and pretend to food: a topic all children understand. Use Halloween as a time to talk about healthy eating choices. It’s fun to collect candy, but now is the time to teach “too much of a good thing” and how too much sugar can make our tummies hurt.

5. Remember the important things for happy, healthy preschoolers: sleep, healthy food, and exercise! Holidays are an easy time to loose track of bed time routines, regular eating habits/rules and keeping our normal activity schedules. It’s never easy to teach your children to enjoy something if they are tired and hungry. Try not to lose track of this, especially since Halloween is just their first exciting holiday in the build-up to Christmas!