Starting on Monday, Caden requested to go to Delaney’s room at daycare. Not after nap, now. Why? She missed Delaney, and if she wasn’t with her she wouldn’t know where she was. While shocked by this sudden turn of events, I thought it was sweet. Daycare said they would try to get them together in the afternoon. Perfect!
Tuesday and Wednesday it only got worse. She cried at drop off. Begged to stay in Laney’s room. WTH? They don’t like each other that much! I couldn’t help but think there was more to this issue, especially since her teachers said she was just fine once the day started.
When I picked her up on Wednesday she told me another girl in her class called her stupid at naptime. I asked if she told her teacher, she said no, she was saving it for me. Here’s the thing with Caden. Emotionally, she’s my mini-me. Well, my mini-me when I was much younger. She’s very sensitive, especially to what other people say. She also really wants her teachers to like her. As soon as we started talking about this, I knew this was the core issue. She couldn’t verbalize it, but I knew she felt like she couldn’t tell on this other girl. She also started saying other things that had happened – the boys tackled her, they hit her on the head, etc. All things that probably have happened, but when? No idea. They could have happened weeks ago.
The other piece of this is that Caden tells on Delaney a lot at home. I try to nip it in the bud, but perhaps that was leaving her feeling like she couldn’t say anything? Or maybe she sensed I didn’t like this so she didn’t want to anger her teachers by doing it at school?
I talked it through with her teacher today and she agreed that this could be it. She had a talk with her about when it was tattling, and when she really needed to tell the teacher. She also told her that even if Caden thought it might be tattling, it was still okay to tell the teacher because they would help her decide if it was tattling or not. Excellent.
From my side? Big changes around here. The tattling can be nonstop, but they’re telling me these things for a reason and I need to validate that when they tell me. I’m also working on validating her feelings when [insert person] says something to her that hurts her feelings. I often find myself saying “Caden, it’s okay, that’s not something we cry about.” Instead, I’m now going with “I know that makes you sad, but it’s what you know in your heart that counts.” or something along those lines. One of these two things happens about every 15 minutes in our house, so we’ve been doing a lot of validation around here.
It’s funny because with twins, I think you think it will be the physical work that is going to exhaust you. And yet, this stuff is way worse for me. I was chatting with my dental hygienist this week and she said “I don’t know how you deal with girls. They’re just so emotionally exhausting!” Ha! Indeed. Even knowing that these kinds of things are what we’re going to be dealing with for oh, the next fifteen years? Does nothing to prepare you for it!
Tattling is super big with the 3-4 set in both boys and girls! Our day care’s rule for things other than hitting or hurting was that you had to talk to the person before talking to an adult. So if someone takes something from them, they had to talk to the person to give it back before getting a teacher involved. We followed that at home too. It did seem nonstop for awhile, better now!
By: LauraC on January 27, 2012
at 8:05 pm