Parents' Emotions

I struggled with him as a baby and to be honest any babies, I don't really enjoy them as kids, and really young children. So, I was looking forward to him growing up. I was looking forward to him going to school because I loved learning as a kid and therefore, I was hoping that he would have that same thirst as what I did, which he does, which is fantastic. If something needs to happen it happens, there's no point worrying about it, just get on with it. So, my partner struggled a little bit emotionally with it: "Oh, it's our baby going to school," I was like, "No, no, this is just another challenge, it's another good thing". And so him going to school was just natural to me, I loved it.

And you know, yeah, we worried, he's… he had two best friends at nursery and that was very settled, so we were anxious, which was more just us I think, he wasn't. We were anxious about him making friends and you know, trying to settle in socially, but actually, I mean when we said this to the teacher he just laughed and said that he talks to all the kids and has a lovely time with them all the time. So, that's just us worrying about him and not him.

At nursery you couldn't have stayed all day but it felt like you had as long as you and your child needed if that's what you wanted whereas school is kind of very much a cut and dry - you drop them off and you go and the teaching staff take care of them. I don't know, it feels a bit abnormal to be the parent of a child that you then can't console and check that they're alright. That part of your day is the school's responsibility and not yours and that's the first situation that I've been put in which is like that.

We were really happy, the school visits when they started and then everything kicked in with his anxiety and he did get quite angry and violent at times over the summer. It was a bit going into the unknown but we were doing everything we could, implementing all of the strategies we'd been taught to try and obviously give him the confidence and the reassurance that it was all good, even if we were thinking, "Oh I don't know how this is going to go," we were trying not to portray that to him. When it obviously got to the first day of school, it was like: "How, how is he going to go in, what's it going to be like?" I think if he had been able to have gone in with the rest of this class rather than going in earlier, I think it would have been an easier transition, because he went from going, the person he was with in the earlier class wasn't anybody that… or a teacher that he'd never met before and there were no children from his reception class in there either. So, I think he struggled with that and he didn't like being left the first few times. So, we tried to do a few things, because he's absolutely tractor mad. He took a little tractor with him, so he took that with him to have that as a bit of reassurance of home.