School or Daycare Avoidance/Refusal Part Two

I talked in a previous blog about school avoidance, and how it can be caused by clinical depression and anxiety in a child. 

My son Lawrence started kindergarten this school year. He was in a wonderful preschool the past two years, where he thrived. Of course we were concerned that he would have a little trouble adjusting to starting kindergarten, but while we got the "trouble adjusting" part right, we got the venue wrong. He's had no trouble adjusting to kindergarten - it's a problem with where he is the rest of the day that is generating phone calls to my husband and I.

After morning kindergarten, Lawrence goes to daycare, which is located on the school grounds. He eats lunch there and then spends the afternoon. At first he seemed to love it - one time he even scolded my husband for picking him up, as he was going to be a penguin in a play they'd been rehearsing. Then we started getting calls, and hearing that he was getting timeouts. And some of the infractions were relatively serious, at least for Lawrence, such as hitting another child or teacher. And Lawrence has started saying more and more that he doesn't want to go to daycare, or that he wants us to pick him up early.

It's a perplexing and frustrating situation for a parent to be in. And let's be honest, it's potentially inconvenient. Although daycare obviously isn't mandatory, as school is, my husband and I both rely on Lawrence being able to go there, or we can't work. So we started brainstorming with the daycare teachers to find the cause. But for a while we were stumped. 

We considered a couple of possibilities. Was he, we asked the daycare teachers, having trouble with other kids? Nothing in particular that they had noticed. Maybe, I thought, the problem is that he isn't getting a nap in the afternoon anymore, as he did in preschool. His personality changes if he's sleep deprived. But on further examination, that explanation didn't seem to make sense. In the past, when he was a little demon due to sleep deprivation, we saw it at home as well as at preschool, and we weren't having any problems with him.

At this point, although we don't have a definite answer to what the problem is, we have a pretty good working hypothesis. When my husband went to pick up Lawrence the other day, the daycare teacher told him that Lawrence had again acted out in a very uncharacteristic way. My husband expressed our bewilderment with the situation with the teacher. She said she believed that the problem might be three things. One is the lack of structure in the daycare environment. Lawrence seems to thrive on some amount of structure, which is probably why he's doing well in kindergarten. But the daycare situation could best be described as "controlled chaos."

That controlled chaos is the second problem. Lawrence is used to, and apparently needs, a fair amount of peace and quiet, only broken at home by himself. At preschool, the two hour nap provided him, even if he didn't sleep, with a long period of peace and quiet. There's none of that at daycare. In fact, there isn't even anywhere he can go to escape the noise and occasional mayhem. Since I'm very sensitive to continual noise, I can definitely relate to that environment possibly making him cranky.