We find ourselves knee-deep in nursery hunt for my son again. It feels like not so long ago I was here, frantically searching for a suitable place to put my barely two year old.
This time feels different; a little heartbreaking even. He is desperately unhappy at his current nursery, and whilst I have tried everything I could to work with the nursery to get to the bottom of it (and they have assured me there is nothing wrong in his environment), I have to concede that my son cannot make things up. After yet another day of picking him up and finding him in tears, and being told he has been shouted at for disrupting circle time, I find my heart a little too heavy to dismiss yet another incident.
I put my son into a Montessori setting because I thought the environment would be better aligned with my own parenting philosophy - a gentler approach to parenting. Over the past 4 or 5 months, it’s been one thing after another where I’m constantly having to talk to nursery about why my toddler is all of a sudden hating school. I’m running out of runway for the number of times I can keep having these conversations. My biggest fear is that I leave my son too long in an environment that’s damaging to him, and that it is killing his little spirit.
He’s recently turned 3, and I’m having to not only think about his remaining time at nursery, but also where he will go to school after. I have finally accepted that I will never crack the UK schooling system, and have decided to put him in an independent (private) school. That makes things a little easier, in that I am now interviewing the schools I am interested in with a view of putting him into their nursery setting if appropriate. Some form of killing two birds with one stone.
Selecting a suitable school is also presenting itself with a myriad of things to consider and weigh-up. I hope to share that with you in a follow-up post. In the meantime, I’ll share this pragmatic post on a checklist for a nursery search.
Nobody prepares you for this part of motherhood; where you try your best to protect your children and you feel the world is a little too harsh, a whole lot crueller than it needs to be. Who shouts at a child? My heart is a little heavy today. Next week will be better.
x Kate
