Axelle Advani - Positive Education specialist and Family Therapist in London, helps us parents travel through our children's first days of school.
In a few days, our little angels that we love so much will return back to school.
First time to school for the Maternelles (children in kindergarten), or back to a school they know for older children.
As involved parents, we are doing our best, we carry best intentions, we even have spent few weeks caring for them, organising all sorts of plans to entertain them, to show them the world and have wonderful experiences.
Back to School always brings back its load of worries. While it seems that most of us strive to be great parents, we may also find ourselves sometimes confused and frustrated by seemingly endless challenges of parenthood.
What to expect for our children on the first days
Some of our children will leave us at the gate reassured, walking confidently to their friends.
Some of them and particularly the ones starting school for the first time will endure difficulties to leave us.
Nevertheless even the most confident child may after few days have some reactions that may leave us disoriented.
What to expect for us
Depending of our own childhood, all those moments we had to separate from our own parents and how we were guided will influence on how we find easy or not to accompany our own child to the gate of school.
Besides our own story within the school interfere with what we believe may happen to our own child.
Opening up to all those maybe painful memories would help to be better observer to the true reality of our own child.
Before the D- day
Taking a moment to spend time and talk with our child on what he should expect to live would help.
Because we want to plant seeds of positiveness, we may throw lots of sparkle on how good it would be to see friends after having missed them for the past 6 weeks.
And how it is important that children carry on to their education because this will give them more opportunities to choose their jobs once they are grown-ups.
If all those are important messages, children and particularly young ones don’t anticipate life as a whole. Their world is mainly day to day, and the important messages they need to have is that we will understand their inner world.
Before going back to school, we may ask them questions on how they feel to go back to school? What may give them enthusiasm? What makes them feel uncomfortable? Do they have fears or some sort? What would they need us to give them as a little ritual in front of the school?
For the younger children - mainly in Maternelle - their intense reactions is linked to a vital need that we call attachment. Attachment theory has been empirically observed by many scientists for 70 years, it is roughly how the child is relating to his careers then to his environment. There is two main categories secured attachment and unsecured. This attachment takes place mainly the first 9 months of living and is more refined for the first 2 years after being born. Depending on their attachment style, children will develop strategies to interact with the outside world. Securely attached children will cry before being separated from us and may cry once we pick them up, those tears will certainly be comforted by our welcoming arms and tone of voice and this is fine. The fear of abandonment and separation is one of the main causes of anxiety in children. Haïm Ginott writes: "no separation without preparation" because children's greatest fear is that their parents will stop loving them and abandon them.
After a few days
Novelty and excitement pass and it is common for children to have emotional outbursts when they leave school. They can howl, cry, scream, no longer want to walk, ask for the other parent, refuse a broken cookie...or being ungrateful to our lovely pain au chocolat..
Those reactions are normal in the sense that the school days are stressful.
Children will be without their attachment figure for many hours - ideally they entertain a good relationship with their teacher that will become the substitute of an attachment figure.
They have to over-adapt themselves - being still on a chair, not making noises, standing in line, controlling their immense need of interacting freely with their peers. Those adaptations will translate into tensions in the body that will explode to the person they trust the most, Maman or Papa.
What we can do when our child is having a crisis after school
First of all, understand that their behaviours is mainly dictated by the fact that their brains are immature. The small child is dominated by his archaic brain (seat of spontaneous reactions, without passing through reasoning and control of impulses). The neural circuits that connect the higher brain (seat of thinking) to the archaic and emotional brains are not functional. Since the circuits that link the emotional brain to the higher brain are not yet built, the small child is dominated by his emotional brain: he experiences his emotions with extreme intensity.
Knowing that, adults should see the storm in their child as a sign of trust they have for them and Parents reactions will make a huge difference. If our child finds himself in a storm, our role is to be the lighthouse of calm, reassurance, and open arms. Once our child is calm, we may attempt to have open conversations to adapt new strategies with them.
What we can do to prevent the crisis
What we commonly call crisis is effectively a discharge of tensions accumulated by being over-stretched with our stress level. Stress is existing in our body with a level of stress hormones being released.
To give the best chances to our child to regulate his stress hormones, one answer: LOVE.
Love within the body is marked by the presence of the hormone oxytocin. So to replenish this balance of love hormones, we need to fill their emotional tank every day even if it is only 5 minutes. This can be done in several ways, with each family finding the way that suits them best. The main idea is that it is a moment of real reconnection, pleasant for everyone (and if possible without external distractions like the smartphone):
* take a screen-free nature walk
* take the time to discuss, to really listen
* get a massage
* cook/garden
* play a board game
* colour / draw / paint together
* sing
* say pleasant, positive, encouraging words to each other
* go to the library
* read a book / a free reading
And furthermore ….
We were raised 30, 40 years ago by our parents that mainly replicated what they themselves received. Nowadays Neurosciences have brought up to the light that Positive Education is related to various aspects of healthy child development. While parents gain confidence, optimism and find joy into their day to day interactions with their children. Children learn better emotional regulation, autonomy, resilience - such outcomes are neither fleeting nor temporary; and will continue well beyond childhood.
I am Axelle Advani - Positive Education specialist and Family Therapist, Mum of two beautifully Neuro-divergents Boys aged 10 and 12 years old that had a lot of crisis while I picked them up at their Primary School.
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