Daddy, make a picture

Tomorrow is J’s last day at his nursery school.

I have very mixed feelings about the whole nursery school thing. There was a time, I suppose, where nursery school was just a place to drop a three or four year old child off where they could just be kids with other kids. They’d pick up some sorely needed socialization skills and maybe even learn how to spit or that other three year olds crack up when you belch really loudly (even the girls).

These days, apparently, nursery school is where you develop the skills you will need in kindergarten… which I suppose is where you develop the skills you will need to choose a career path, an investment strategy, a retirement community, etc., etc.

J is what you might call a ‘young three.’ He was born in November which makes him younger than most of the kids (well, all of the kids) in his class. He can be awkward around people, sometime prefering not to look older people in the eye. And he has that long attention span and ability to focus on one task until he figures it out that apparently drives teachers up the wall.

A huge problem I’ve been having with J’s teachers and the woman who heads the program is their ‘we know what’s best for your child you silly little parent’ attitude. Another is their emphasis on separation between parent and child. For example, they have this silly little rule that we aren’t supposed to carry our children from the car, across the parking lot to the school… they are supposed to walk there on their own. So if J is feeling a little emotionally needy one morning and I carry him to the school so he can get a last minute dose of huggies from daddies…. I’m stunting his development.

Back in December we were called into a meeting with J’s teachers and the head of the program to discuss his progress. They were concerned that J wasn’t socializing with them or the other children. Basically they laid out a series of symptoms they observed which sounded a lot like autism. But oddly enough when we said he didn’t show any of those symptoms around us or when we were in the class watching him with the other children and the teacher. They’re response was that he was acting that way because we were around.

Ok, so autism can be turned on and off.

So lo and behold, a month or two later they reported that J had shown amazing progress. He opened up, was talking to the other children and to them. Now their question was what were our ‘goals’ for J.

“Um, maybe to have fun, enjoy life and be a kid?”

Well of course that wasn’t good enough. Like I said before, we had to get him ready for the fours program, which gets him ready for kindergarten, which will prepare him to assume a job in a cubicle where he will be forever cut off from natural sunlight and forced to input meaningless data …. (whoops, sorry, that was MY working life….).

So here we are at the end of the year. Next year we enrolled him in a different nursery school. Surprise of surprises, his teacher next year is a woman who used to work at our nursery school but left because she didn’t like the current director.

Maybe things will be better. I don’t know. He really did enjoy himself this year and talks constantly about all the other kids. He really seems to have grown a mile this year. On the other hand, I know in my gut that we’ll be having conferences like that again and again every year until he’s in college. That’s just the kind of kid he is.

And from now on I’m going to follow my gut instinct as far as the kids are concerned. I got a bad vibe from the director the minute I met her and the first weeks of his school, meeting his teachers and attending orientation, did nothing to make my concerns go away. But I chalked it up to new parent jitters. I’ll never do that again.

Whew…