Kindergarden

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mum
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Joined: 25 Mar 2014, 01:09

Kindergarden

Post by mum »

Day 1 Kindergarden
My daughter complains every morning that she doesn't wanna go to kindergarden. She cries, screams and has all kind off excuses why she doesn't wanna go.
I think kindergarden is good for her but because she makes such drama i start to think if the kindergarden is really ok for her?
This morning she started again. And she couldn't stop crying. I tried everything, cuddling talking etc. Only when when i told her to stop otherwise i would pick her up later then 1 she stopped crying.
But i didn't felt good to threaten with picking her up late.

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to feel guilty when my daughter is crying and she needs to go to kindergarden from me.
I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to feel uncertain about sending her to kindergarden when she tells me she doesn't like it.

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to feel uncertain because im not sure if kindergarden is good for her.

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to be unsure about whats the best for my child.

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to feel guilty when i push my child to go to kindergarden.

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to feel guilty when i think i need to threaten because she otherwise wont stop crying.

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to feel nerves and angry when she cries on and on.

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to feel embarrassed for my neighbors when she constantly cries every morning.

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to feel irritated when every morning starts with some drama.

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to feel afraid in the morning because i think she will start again about not willing to go to kindergarden.

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to be afraid off the complaining from my daughter about lots of things.

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to be afraid off my daughter seeing up said, angry, disappointed and unsatisfied.

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to be afraid of seeing negative emotions by my daughters.

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to identify myself with the negative emotions of my daughters.

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to feel guilty if i see my daughters up said because i think its my fault that their unhappy.

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to feel guilty towards my daughters because i think im responsible for their luck and happiness.

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to feel guilty towards my daughters because i wanted to got pregnant of them, so i need to do everything to make them satisfied people.
Marlen
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Re: Kindergarden

Post by Marlen »

Hi, welcome to the forum and glad to see you beginning your Journey to Life!

It's cool that you share your writings here to get further support and perspectives from everyone here about the points you're writing about now in relation to your children.

I don't have any children but I've seen this pattern unfold with my relatives with children and the way to find out why she cries is for you to being investigating the relationship you've formed with her, as well as investigating your own experience within your life at the moment because sometimes the pattern is that children reflect what we are experiencing within ourselves and as such, by one going into reaction within trying to 'fix the problem'in the child we are missing out the point to see that the real stress, unease, emotional experience might exist within us first. So, this is to begin looking at the point beyond your daughter only, but instead look within you, how you are experiencing yourself on a day to day basis, how you react to her reactions and investigate further about this.

You've already taken the step to identify yourself with her emotions, and identifying how you feel guilty, afraid, or get nervous, angry about her experiences. So you can investigate further through only writing more on why you feel guilty about what your daughter is experiencing? where do you fear not doing things right with her? why do you feel the need to resort to threaten to calm her down instead of first investigating within yourself why you started reacting emotionally within you toward her crying?


So, in order to be able to support and assist another to stabilize themselves, first you have to assist and support yourself to stabilize yourself. And that's the point I suggest beginning with and following through in your writings. These are my two cents on this situation.


Also, if you haven't yet walked the free online DIP Lite course, I strongly recommend it to be able to understand all the basic tools of self-support we work with here at the forum as well as openly asking on any point within your self-forgiveness or writings that you may be uncertain of - that you can do here at the forum as well.

Great that you are walking this point here as this is something that many, many more are going through and I'm sure mothers with experience will be able to provide some other suggestions as well.

Enjoy your process and welcome here!
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sandymac
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Re: Kindergarden

Post by sandymac »

Hi mum! Very cool sharing and self forgiveness.

I can so relate to what you are experiencing. When my kids were young and I was working outside the home, I was forever rushing so as not to be late for work, rushing them to get dressed, rushing them to eat and lets go let go. My son was a slow mover, he just did things at his own pace, it was a struggle every morning and he would cry and not want to go to the daycare. It broke my heart to leave him each day.

One morning I could not bare to see his sadness and the guilt was overwhelming and I said 'screw it' and took my time with him. It was just such a relief to slow down and enjoy each other. By the time I got home I was tired and had a million more things to do , as you know, so I felt like there was no down time with him on his 'terms' just to 'be' together.
The problem was I was late many times and then the time I made a self-directive decision to be late, they fired me lol.

So I set up a daycare in my home. There were advantages and disadvantages to that career choice but I could spend more time with my children, which was the coolest point of it.
Mother guilt/parent guilt is tough. I am in the process of learning to stay with my body/the physical and breath, deal with things as they come up and let go of the rest. Cool you are here and starting this process, facing what is coming up inside of you, for you and your children! Stay with it, it is well worth it :)
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Rebecca Dalmas
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Re: Kindergarden

Post by Rebecca Dalmas »

Welcome to the forum mum, glad to see you here.
I had to slow down with my children, and the desteni process has helped a lot. My children talk with me more, call me, and we seem to no longer have outbursts where one walks away, which is really cool.
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Anna
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Re: Kindergarden

Post by Anna »

Hi.

Glad that you decided to join the forum and come here and share yourself. Because this is a point that many parents experience and have no solutions for. So it is cool to open this point up here.

In addition to the support given by Marlen and Sandy I can share my perspective as a preschool teacher focusing more on the concept of preschools in general.
My daughter complains every morning that she doesn't wanna go to kindergarden. She cries, screams and has all kind off excuses why she doesn't wanna go.
I think kindergarden is good for her but because she makes such drama i start to think if the kindergarden is really ok for her?
When I looked at this I saw the following: For a child going to kindergarten is similar to us having to go to work, so in a way the kindergarten is their 'work-place' meaning that it is something they have to do on a daily basis even though they might not want to, just like we have to go to work to make money even though we don't want to. It's part of the same system of survival that we have created. So if we imagine how many of us often resist going to work, we can see how this is no different from a child. The difference is that they don't yet understand the necessity of going to kindergarten and so they express their dissatisfaction whereas we simply bite the apple and go to work because we know we have no choice. Some children function very well in the kindergarten environment and they will then not have the same resistance as others. But the thing is that the kindergarten environment, just like our work-places is set up 'one-dimensionally' in that it doesn't cater to all the children's individual needs. Often there is a very high noise level, it's chaotic and can be quite a 'brutal' experience for a little child with regards to the hierarchies between children and the lack of effective adult support - again similar to how many of us feel towards our work-places. So considering this, there's nothing 'natural' about the kindergarten environment. It is a constructed place set up specifically to have somewhere to keep the children safe while adults go to work to make money. And for most of us we simply don't have a choice. So considering this you can place yourself in the shoes of your child and have a look at what you can do to assist her to integrate more effectively into the kindergarten environment. One option would be to be with her there for a couple of days. This would also give you a chance to see how the children interact.

Unfortunately many kindergartens aren't the most optimal environments for children but there's little we can do about it on a short-term basis besides the option of home-schooling that Sandy was talking about. So my perspective is that it is also about understanding the current situation of our world and how your child is equally affected by this as are we all. And while you might not be able to explain this to her at this stage in a way she will understand, perhaps it will assist you to not look at the situation only from a personal level, but to also see that this is part of a bigger problem and as such that it isn't yours, your daughters or the kindergartens fault. Here it can then also assist greatly to change how you approach the situation for yourself like Marlen and Sandy was mentioning.

As for a solution besides what has already been suggested on an individual level by Marlen and Sandy, we require a complete change of our educational systems where focus is moved from profit-optimization and 'efficiency' to actual real care for our children, where their individual needs are regarded and taken into consideration. Such a solution is possible with the Guaranteed Living Income System.
This morning she started again. And she couldn't stop crying. I tried everything, cuddling talking etc. Only when when i told her to stop otherwise i would pick her up later then 1 she stopped crying.
But i didn't felt good to threaten with picking her up late.
Yes definitely suggest to not use threats. The reason why threats work is because they use fear to scare the child into obedience which obviously isn't what we want for our children. If you are able to talk to your child about why she doesn't like kindergarten perhaps you will also see that there might actually be some concrete reasons, like other children being mean for example which you could possibly assist her with. One method is to ask her to draw the kindergarten and who is there and in a very open and playful way open up communication about what it is like there. Many times children will go into a 'lock down' if they feel we are interrogating them or they will tell us what they think we want to hear. So if you do it in a 'casual' way where it's not really about asking questions but about the drawing, she might open up more and you can see whether it is something you can assist her with practically or not.
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sylvia
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Re: Kindergarden

Post by sylvia »

Hi mum welcome to the forum!

When my kids were around that age I've gone through more or less the same experiences as you. With my youngest, my son, it was in pre-kindergarten where he cried when I brought him into his class and saying goodbye. He would throw himself on the ground and cry. The teachers didn't allow me to stay, so I always left quite emotional. My son didn't like it there because he wasn't challenged at the points he wanted to be challenged and as Anna said, that's how the educational system works right now in most cases. With my oldest, my daughter, I had these problems of not wanting to go to school only from grade one onward. She would cling to my leg en cry in a devastating way, the teacher had to literarily pull her off of me. I went home crying twice a day and it became a burden to me. Also here my child was not challenged at her cognitive level. She had to do all the things she already knew, since she was tested as 'gifted' and not 'highly gifted' she wasn't allowed to do work outside the normal curriculum. So both my kids got the same message in school that they were not good enough, not worthy enough and the system thought they were stupid no matter what they showed. My son somehow wasn't really affected by it later on in his school career, though my daughter is still struggling with that point at 17.

My daughter told me years later that she experienced school as a prison and she tried to hide from it by sitting under tables or spending a lot of time in toilets and not doing the simple tasks that were asked from her in a proper way which only confirmed the teachers that she wasn't that smart at all.

So it is cool if you can figure out what it is your daughter doesn't like at kindergarten, that way you might be able to tackle that problem. Another important thing here is the way we try to handle such situation where we do not know how to fix it, however we feel that we as the parent are the ones that have to fix it. We are our kids superheroes, if we can't fix it , who will? At least that's how it feels most of the time. It's a vicious cycle we find ourselves in since the starting point of our communication with our kids is based on manipulation. So your daughter starts to manipulate the situation in a unconscious way by crying and not wanting to go to school.That's a strong weapon of the child when it comes to convincing the mom. Since all our communication has the starting point of manipulation, we will respond back to the child in the same manipulative way and threaten not to pick her up right away. So what happens is, that there doesn't appear to be real communications, the child acts from fear of having to go to school and you as a mom act from the fear of not getting her to go to school and enjoy it. The point would be to really listen to each other and let the fear go, which is a challenge since we as mums are taught the same manipulative way by our parents.

Within all this manipulation of the relationship the guilt emerges, because somehow we unconsciously know that our behavior isn't cool, since we did it as a child and we still do it as a grown up. So in order to avoid or prevent the guilt we must stop the manipulation and start communicating for real.

You could ask if you could stay a bit longer at school to see what is bothering your child and if she's really unhappy there, or like we had, once a month a day that we assisted the teacher which gave cool inside about my kid at school. With my daughter I had a person in the school that gave me a call as soon as my daughter calmed down, so I knew she was more or less okay. With your child, it's more at home that she is protesting, so you could try to change your routine in the mornings to see if that helps and as said before the child may reflect you or is trying to get you in the here and now by crying. So also for us moms it's essential to look at who we are within these kinds of events. And ask yourself how much are you in your mind when doing the morning routine? I would suggest to do some Self-Forgiveness on the manipulation point with the guilt as an outflow if that point is clear to you, if not please ask.

A cool point of support is the parenting series of EQAFE, the first 5 are free, it's a great investment in yourself and your child if you're able to.
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Carrie
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Re: Kindergarden

Post by Carrie »

Hey mum! Cool blog! Thanks for sharing here on the forum.

I have two children that are 17 years apart in age and with both have had completely different experiences. My oldest really enjoyed school and there was never a problem aside from when she was 8 and the children in her class were in a big amount of stress. She considered homeschooling at this point but fortunately the school was able to sort the issues out so she continued to stay in school. My second child has had a pre-school experience - which, I saw he was doing fine with aside from some points that needed to be adjusted - he, however, says that he did not like it and has expressed that he does not want to go back to public school. So, we homeschool and am in the process of readjusting my work schedule to nights and weekends so that we can make this work.

A friend of mine has a daughter that handled school in a similar way to what you shared with your daughter here. My friend decided to homeschool and noticed a huge difference with the child immediately - she says that here child is much more relaxed and the emotional outbursts/tantrums are much fewer. My friend says that her family and close friends are amazed at the change - even if they generally do not support homeschooling, they see how it is best for this particular child. So, homeschooling could be something to consider for a solution if you're financially and physically (and mentally lol) able to do so.

As the others have suggested, it would be best to stop the threatening. It is a short-term solution that does not stand the test of time - meaning, after awhile it won't work and you'll have to make the threats more intense. I have found it's just not worth it. It's not best for the child and it's not best for you because it's going to create a lot of unnecessary guilt - see, you're already aware that it's not best and that the use of threatening limits yourself, your child, and your relationship - so here is where the guilt comes in. Guilt is a cool 'marker' for the points that we can work in improving and changing.

I would suggest to start practicing not reacting with anger/frustration when it comes up within you. When you feel it coming on/rising up, BREATH. Practice not saying anything to the child until your anger/frustration has diminished. This will take some time - so if you don't get it right away, just keep practicing. Also, making changes in response to your guilt will assist with this GREATLY! Because when it comes down to it, you're not actually angry with the child, you're angry with yourself.
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mum
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Re: Kindergarden

Post by mum »

Thanks for all the comments and help.
I have 2 daughters, the oldest who goes to kindergarden is 4 and the younger one is 2.
The complaining from my oldest daughter started half a year ago, i think when she realized that her little sister stays with mum and she need to go away. I already asked her 100 times why she doesn't like kindergarden, because i am already facing this problem for a long time. Then she tells me that she doesn't like the food, and doesn't like the story because she needs to sit and wait. I already told her that her that her little sister will start in one month at kindergarden, that does her make better as well. And i explained her that i love them both the same, and wish my youngest could also start but she is not a loud and need to wait for one more month. My daughter is also very inpatient and controlling. I think my daughter wants children to listen to her and if they don't do that she is disappointed. She is not a great eater as well, so most off the time i pick her up before lunch. So she is only in kindergarden for 3 or 4 hours. I think that is very reasonable.
I think its good she learns to play with other kids, and most off the time when i pick her up she is very happy and playing. Its only that she every morning starts with asking can i stay at home? And if i then say no, she starts to scream.
I must say that its already a bit better since selfforgivness :)
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viktor
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Re: Kindergarden

Post by viktor »

Cool Mum,

Another might be supportive is to communicate with your child why it is that you are leaving her at the preschool. Many parents tend to take for granted that their children is to understand the pressures of making a living in the world system, earning money, and surviving – yet children have no concept of how difficult life can be when you grow older. Here you could thus assist and support your child through educating her about why preschools exist, why it is that she can not be at home with you during the day and why it is that in this world as it currently exist, were are not able to always structure our life's according to what is optimal.

If you sending your kid to preschool not because of time or money constraints, but with the intention of having him or her develop social skills – then it might be a cool idea to discuss this with your child as well; explain to her why it is important to develop social skills, why it is important to get out there even though one do not always feel like it, and how social skills, when developed, will be a great tool for the rest of one's life.

These are my suggestions, and the underlying principle within them all is to educate your child to have a effective understanding of what is going on and why things are happening as they are – because with such a understanding there will clarity and direction, which will make it more difficult to place a emotional veil over that which is practical.
Michelle
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Re: Kindergarden

Post by Michelle »

Hi Mum, thanks for sharing yourself here and cool you are supporting yourself with Self-Forgiveness!

I agree with Viktor in that I find it's supportive to communicate with your child about why she is going to preschool and you can even remind her how much she enjoys playing with other students or other toys in the classroom so that way she knows she's getting something enjoyable being there.

As for your daughter being a picky eater, is there any way you could make her snack or provide food she would like to eat at school? Perhaps that can assist.

You mention your daughter is impatient and controlling. Children are the reflection of their parents so you may want to investigate for yourself where you are impatient and controlling to assist you in the your process of self-change.
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