5 y/o son's separation anxiety

Post Reply New Topic

My son is having problems going to preschool. He wants me to stay in the classroom with him. THis is not possible due to my schedule and I have a younger child in tow. Yet, if we tell him I am waiting outside or in the parents room, he seems fine. He has severe anxiety/meltdown (30 min or so to calm down) when I leave him when he wants me to stay. Is this a phase? We would like him to be able to start kindergarten next year, but I am also questioning the whole school thing. I'm not sure I could home school all by myself, but there are probably others out there to group up with??? I just have so many questions right now. We are just trying to figure this out and what might work for our son. His separation anxiety is so extreme. Has anyone else dealt with this??

Oh yes, I dealt with this in preschool and I'm still dealing with it in kindergarten! Just this morning, I had to pry my son out of the car. He cries for a while at school but eventually settles down, and some days are better than others. It's hard for me to leave him there but his aide is very patient with him.

YES, Busgrl, my son had the same thing, and he is now homeschooling , with a correspondence course to give us a legally recog framework so don't get inspection visits ,( france tougher on homeschooling than UK or USA), for the third year running and it works fine. 8 year old son taught himself to read this last spring, a relief cos was getting worried but trying not to panic or put pressure.
He does an hour and a half of "homework" a day for the assessment purposes ( none of the coursework) , and that's it.
It's simple.
And we avoid so much of the needless stress of the schooling system.
Son has tried school twice, one morning aged 3, total disaster, ( when picked him up at lunchtime he clung to me as if he thought he was about to die , as he had never clung to me before; he had been terribly scared. And it's not surprising; schools are terrifying environments, with open-front toilets so everybody sees you wiping your bum, with teachers so overwhelmed by workload can not remember my son has coeliac disease, so is offered bread for snack at break despite long discussion beforehand in which say son will have his own snack with him in his bag, in which "not speaking"/being quiet is being good and therefore not needing attention, etc etc etc etc ; the daily routine nightmare of school) then 9 days over about 3 weeks aged 5, during which we discussed it a lot, and he kept giving it a new go, but then his screams and cries and fighting the teachers to be able to go with me got so obviously serious and desperate that I realised his best intentions to give it go were clearly exhausted. And he knew he could choose. Most children don't even know that in a sense that is their right.
And I'm at home, we get by on one income; it's very close thing but manage.
Recommend it , in all ways, in everything.
My AS/PDD son , and me his Aspergers mother , are so much happier like this!

Good luck , and best wishes!! There's several other homeschoolers on WP , so plenty of tips and support. There was another thread on it not so long ago. pm me if have other questions! tho' won't get reply for next 12 hours cos it's midnight here and i'm off to bed!!

Last edited by ouinon on 17 Nov 2007, 12:30 pm, edited 2 times in total.

I'm not sure these doorless toilets are a very good idea. An aspie child (or any child for that matter) would be used to toilets at home where you can close the door and so might have accidents at school because the toilets are too different from what they have grown up with.

Pandora, the school my brother and I went to in California didn't have bathroom doors on them either. The administration claimed that too many kids broke them and so they just removed them.
We didn't use school bathrooms until high school.

THank you BugsMom and ouinon for your quick replies about separation anxiety and homeschooling. Last night at work I had a thought that I could print out a photo of myself or my son and me together and clip it to him (like my work ID) to go to school. THen he could look at it and have me there with him while he is at school. Has anyone tried this? I will post how it works after I try it. Unfortunately, we have another weeklong break for the US Thanksgiving holiday. We always regress and lose progress during these breaks. He only goes to school 3 days a week. My triumph is he made it 3 out of three this past week and came home on the school bus as well! Yet, I'm not sure if the struggle is worth it. He has been late on all developmental milestones and going to school is the first one we have "forced" on him. THe others we just allowed him to do when he was ready (walk, talk, etc.)

I'm going to be really blunt here... this may not apply to your situation, but it applies to 100% of the situations I've seen.

In my experience as a preschool teacher, children who have prolonged difficulties with separation anxiety are being kept that way by their parents' reactions. Usually the mother has the mistaken notion that if she does what her child tells her or gives in to his tantrums or crying, the child will be comforted. This is almost never the case. The best thing that a parent can do is be firm and confident. Take your child to school, tell him you love him, and leave. Do not negotiate. You are the grown up. He is counting on you to show him what's okay and what's not.

Almost every kid does fine as soon as mom is out of earshot. A few take longer to adjust, but when the mother acts unsure, she's prolonging that period of adjustment, not making it better. Kids have natural dispositions and some have an easier time going to school while others prefer mama, but beyond those natural tendencies, the kid takes his cues from you.

children do fine after mum out of earshot because they understand that there is no longer any point in expressing their heartfelt wishes; they will simply not be listened to.
I was firm and confident every morning after the first, when he was five and tried 9 days over 3 weeks, but he did not like it; for very good reasons I realised after talking with him about what they did and how things had gone etc; schools are alienating, unnatural, terrifying unless fully NT (! !), completely absurd and now out-of-date, falling to bits, anachronisms which are not good for most children. THAT is why my son did not want to go. When I went for a parent-teacher meet at end of afternoon, and was able to watch son when he did not know I was there, I saw how silent and shockingly INACTIVE ( my son who doesn't stop from morning to night creating, thinking, playing, reading, drawing etc) and on the edges he was. And his teacher said he was very good and so on, when pressed this consisted of being quiet, saying not a word , and doing what he was told. Obviously she loved him as a pupil.
And the attack on parent, because that is what it is, blaming it on the parent , rather than respecting the childs own very clear expression of his desires, is unacceptable on a site for people who have already far too often experienced this sort of accusation and criticism, for bad mothering etc , causing AS etc.
Think as a mother, if you are one, and forget how much your salary depends on continuing to work in schools.
There is a terrible myth fashionable in our society that a child who does not like school is unhealthy or has an unhealthy mother. This is extremely offensive.
School is presented as quite obviously "a good thing" , and anyone who does not agree is labelled mentally ill, phobic or fusional, or suffering from " separation anxiety". As if it is totally IMPOSSIBLE that people might not like school for deep and important reasons.
Increasing numbers of people homeschool because they dare to challenge this insane idea that children need teaching in order to learn, AND that school is a wonderful place for children to spend most of their waking childhood hours.
************

Last edited by ouinon on 17 Nov 2007, 2:38 pm, edited 1 time in total.

How "heartfelt" was that wish, when the kid then spends the whole day having fun? Kids love their moms, of course. And don't we all wish we could stay home all day. But kids live in reality just like adults and they can't always have exactly what they please. I think the notion of "attachment parenting" has done a lot of damage to children. My students were nurtured, had fun, and grew in every way under my care. Parents shouldn't leave their children with caregivers they're unsure about, and if the parents are sure that the school or daycare is a safe and loving place to be, they shouldn't act nervous in front of their child about leaving him there.

Kids don't know what's best for them all of the time. They need to be guided and shown by the adults who care for them.




Good for you. Some women have to work outside the home. Are their kids just screwed then, 'cause they have to go live in an "unnatural" environment all day?



I'm not blaming anybody for creating AS. I'm saying that sometimes good parenting involves refraining from acting on our first urges (in this case, to stay and "comfort" a child who has formed the habit of protesting something that is a necessary part of his schedule). If your child threw a tantrum like that about brushing his teeth, you wouldn't comfort him and say "that's okay, you don't have to brush." You'd teach him to accept that brushing his teeth is part of his life, even if he might prefer something else. We can see in every part of life that the first thing we might want to do isn't necessarily the right thing or the wisest thing to do.



I actually don't work as a preschool teacher right now, thanks. And yes, I'm a mother.

Where did I say he went on to have fun all day?
It doesn't have to be the mother who stays home, it could be each of them part time, and increasing numbers of people work from home. It is possible to combine that with homeschooling.
Homeschooling is not for a privileged few. Except in so far as it takes either a generally middle-class confidence that can do it, or desperation, that is increasingly pushing people to do it as they see their childs happiness and confidence ruined by schooling.
It is a choice made by people who decide to make that investment in their childs wellbeing rather than in more money for other things. Most of the homeschoolers I know in France and the UK are poor, getting by, doing it because it is quite clearly better for their children. It costs them precious money. And yet it is that important.
Schooling is not obligatory, and it is not at all clear that it is good for a child, unlike brushing teeth, so can only say to child "this is something you have to do because we need the money", which rings strange bells along the lines of child labour.

Last edited by ouinon on 17 Nov 2007, 2:56 pm, edited 2 times in total.

Just saw your edit.

I'm actually a very big supporter of homeschooling.

And I've not said the things that you accuse me of saying. Don't read more into my words than what I actually say, please.

I'm not talking about your son. I don't know him.

I said that in all of the cases I personally have seen, the child had fun while the mother was gone. Sorry you had such a bad experience. I've seen plenty of AS kids thrive in a school setting that takes their needs into consideration.

I agree that less hidebound-rigid-alienating-oppressive schools do exist, but there are simply not enough of them, largely because the very foundation and premise of schools is such as to sabotage/block most efforts to humanise them.
I admit that my own bad experiences count for a great deal in my reaction to your post, not only my own childs passionate, and precisely enumerated, reasons/arguments for not going to school, but also my own as AS child , Aspergers, therefore "bright" but continually "stupid" ! !, vast stretches of my childhood wasted on interminable, repetitive, genuinely pointless exercises. Years and years of "school". My son has learned to read and write and add up, and multiply etc etc on a mere one and a half hours of " schooling" a day for the last 3 years. In fact learning to read had more to do with computer use and Tintin etc!! Apart from that tiny amount of time each day he has been free to explore and deepen interests, to think, to play etc. He has had TIME.
And I think for AS children that is almost always a precious thing, which most schools remove from them.
And it ( loss of time) is probably one of the biggest shocks that Aspergers/HFAS children have on going to a standard school, NOT the presence or absence of mother, except in so far as her continued presence might suggest to them that they may still be able to LEAVE !

(I didn't KNOW that I had a choice. I thought that I had to put up with school. I resigned myself to it. I even began to "buy" the philosophies behind it; I took on sheep mentality, and learned to want to be like other people.)
So I suppose whenever I think there's a chance that a child might escape the homogenising machine I feel a leap of hope in me, ...
Ok, so some families/home lives are hideous/ghastly, the worst environments. Mine maybe!!
But I don't see what on earth teaching a child that it can not always have what it wants, (something that I expect it has been fully aware of since birth like most humans!!) has to do with making them go to school???
!

Last edited by ouinon on 17 Nov 2007, 3:42 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Yeah. Personally I think a lot of the problems with schools are due to the fact that in a society dominated by two-income families (or single parents), schools are forced to function primarily as baby-sitters rather than places to get an education. Thus, all the busy work and time spent on teaching children how to be in line, be quiet, do "group work", tutor slower children, etc. rather than actually teaching them useful information that will help them succeed as adults. I don't think it's any conspiracy to "dehumanize" children, just an unfortunate social convention that isn't necessarily the best option for all involved.

But at a preschool level, at least in my area of the world, the kids get plenty of free time and plenty of attention. A lot depends on the individual teacher though.

Hi! I had to reply to this one, my oldest son has major seperation anxiety. I am currently having my almost 9yr old evaluated for an asd, and am now realising that my oldest has had similar traits which have gone undiagnosed. My oldest will be 18 in about 8 weeks.
When my oldest (Chris) was little he went to creche and he cried all day just about. We could hear him screaming from one end of the street to the other. I Didn't pull him out we had no option he had to go, this was a great preschool staff were very simpathetic.
Primary school- he cried all day everyday for a year and a half, I would call in unannounced from time to time and yes he was crying. He made himself sick, and gave himself asthma attacks ( which were ignored by this school which made his stresss worse) I pulled him out and put him in another primary school with his new best friend, things settled down a little- no more crying but he complained of being sick every day. He is now in high school and still I get calls from the school more often than any one else, can you come get him he is sick, he has a head ache etc. He is usually ok not long after getting home. I cant even go to a friends house less than 5 minutes walk away without him calling me " when are you coming home mum"
Home schooling wasnt an option, I wish it was. I never gave in to his demands, maybe I should have. As I said this all still happens he is nearly 18 and has very few friends (none that come to the house, and he never visits them) He is lonely and a self confessed mummys boy. He is a fantastic kid, not your typical teen. He does attend fulltime school, and has worked part time for the past 2 years.
All I can say is follow your gut, I wouldn't pull my child out of school completely though can you do it half and half? These issues dont go away. Chris did see a shrink when he was little, and maybe had we know as may have been part of the issue. Who knows. Any way good luck. Remember he is your child and you need to go with what you feel is right. Maybe even look at a different school or hold off for a year.

Wow, I apologize in advance, but I just can't keep my mouth shut on this one.
Not only did my daughter have seperation anxiety in both preschool and kindergarten, but it had NOT ONE DAMNED THING to do with my being firm, parenting skills, etc. It DID have to do with daughter's inability to function socially, and not feeling as if she fit in, AND the other children not being able to understand her. IMO, and keep in mind that is just my opinion, things like this may not be an issue of standing firm, etc. It may be that the child is feeling some anxiety due to the social aspects of pre-school /kindergarten, etc, and really only calms down/improves when mom is gone because they have no other choice. I have always been Kalli's "safe person". Out of all the people in a pre-school setting, kindergarten (and now 1st grade) classroom, I was the only one that she felt understood her fears. Didn't mean to appear off topic here, but I keep seeing this being addressed as a behavioral issue as opposed to a possible anxiety issue. And, as someone with severe anxiety issues I have found that stnading firm and NOT addressing the underlying reasons can be severely detrimental. I would recommend finding the root of the seperation anxiety and and working on that. That should not only decrease the frequency and severity, but should also put the little one at ease.