What Doesn't Kill You

Parenting seems to be a series of little battles, and we survived one of the bigger ones recently.

We sent Liam to Parents' Night Out one night mid-January. I knew that this wasn't going to come as particularly exciting him, so I tried all day to get him psyched up for "the pizza party."

Traumatized. Absolutely traumatized.

Liam typically loves school. I've always said day care has been a very positive experience for him considering his extremely shy personality. He's always so happy there and has a lot of fun with the kids who he's essentially grown up with.

For the entire week after Parents' Night Out, he cried. All day long. I would watch him on the video stream via the Internet trying (often unsuccessfully) to hold back my own tears. I had to fight the urge to leave work and go pick up him and spend the day with him. Longterm, I didn't figure that would do him any good - it's just give him the expectation that I'd come pick him up the next day, too, and delay his readjustment.

We traced it back to the teacher who he hung out with the entire night at PNO. For the next couple weeks, he would just scream if she came anywhere near him. I talked to everyone who was there that night to see if I could get some insight. By all accounts, she didn't do anything (the director of the day care watched the footage of the entire evening trying to find something that could explain his behavior), and he seemed to have a good time with her throughout. I think that he either just came to associate her with being at school after dark on a weekend which, to him, just wasn't right, or he came back home that night and had a bad dream about her, which he remembered as being real. Maybe she did something benign that he misperceived.

She's a nice teacher, and we trust everyone there - we wouldn't send our kids there if we didn't. Not to say I'd completely write off my child, but he just never gave us anything conclusive while he's pretty good at communicating specifically by now.

We felt like we were at a crossroads while it was going on. We thought that this whole arrangement, which had worked so well for so long, was just kind of falling apart on us. We thought about looking into other options like Montessori, and we thought it wouldn't end.

The second week after PNO, every day got progressively better. He would cry in the morning, maybe the whole morning through, but he would cheer up in the afternoon. Finally, we reduced the crying time to about 15 minutes in the morning.

Then it came time to move him up to the next classroom because he turned 3. We were so terrified of how this transition was going to go in light of what we had just gone through. We felt like he was in such a fragile state, but there was no sense in delaying the inevitable. Full speed ahead.

It has been WONDERFUL!!! He is so happy again, and we are so happy. I think he cried till about 10:30 the first day, and by the second week or so, he stopped crying altogether when he was dropped off. Now, he's having so much fun with the older kids in a less chaotic atmosphere, and he's learned so much already.

We learned through all this not to fear a phase. The way he was acting, we thought there was no WAY it could have been a phase, and we were sure that his entire personality had done a permanent 180. If he came out of that alive and kicking, though, then we can survive anything. Thank goodness. It's such a helpless feeling to watch your child go through something so emotional, but he seems to have come through it a little tougher than he was before.

Now, if only we can just get through the defiance that comes with being 3, we'll be golden!