Kindergarten: Is your child happy there?

[Anonymous]

My child turned 5 last summer, and we sent him in the best public school we found - Somerset Elementary (Mont. County). I don't know what is the real problem:
- is he too young? (We were not aware of possibility to hold him back for a year)
- is the curriculum too rigid? (They are teaching them to write TEXTS already, and math... oh my God...)
- No Child Left Behind program?..
But he is obviously not happy there... He has started saying to us that he is stupid...
I am trying to understand is it a common situation we are experiencing, or not all schools are like that? Do you like your child's school?
Me and my husband want a really good education for our children, but we believe that the start shouldn't be like that.

[Anonymous]

A couple of things --

As great a school as Somerset is , many public schools come with a bit of rigidity. We have heard that our public school (Westbrook) is somewhat rigid as well, without much in the way of visual arts, performing arts, music, etc. They really focus on the reading, writing and arithmetic -- that's it. Maybe your son would thrive in a setting that isn't so traditional.

He may very well be too young. Not to open up this entire debate about redshirting, but in most independent school settings your child would be very young for kindergarten. Of course this depends on your child's level of maturity.

I can't comment as to whether it is common for a child your son's age to think that s/he is stupid. However, this is the time in their lives where they really need to be excited about learning. If he's unhappy, chances are the environment might not be a good fit. Purely anecdotal, but my son absolutely LOVES school. He hasn't always. He hated his pre-K experience, and we learned that it just wasn't the right fit for him. We moved schools and I can't tell you how excited this kid is to go to school every morning.

[Anonymous]

Oh, this makes me so upset. I dont think a Kindergartener thinking he is "stupid" is okay at all. My son is in 1st grade this year at a DC private school. He loves it. He loves to go to school every day. His teachers say he is "incredibly enthusiastic about learning." That is how it should be. It was the same for him last year, also at the same school, for Kindergarten. In K, learning to read can be a bit challeneging, as can writing for boys, and he would get frustrated sometimes, but thinking he was "stupid" - no way. A good school would never create a situation where your child would call himself stupid. This is REALLY wrong. We worked really hard to pick the right school for him and he has blossomed since he started at this school. In preschool, his teachers had actually worried about his self-esteem, too. This is no longer even a slight issue. Your son's school just sounds like it is not right for your child.

[Anonymous]

I think you are right to be concerned. However, before writing off the school, I would try to work with the school to try to identify what the problem might be. Based on my own experience I think it would be helpful to try to schedule a conference with your child's teacher and let the teacher know this is an issue. See if you can jointly identify what the problem is. There may be one specific issue in the day that is causing you son's unhappiness, and this might be fixable. In my son's case, he was down on himself because he was always last in his class to finish his written work and the other kids were making comments about it. It took several conversations with my son to get this out. Don't try to sit down and have a "very special conversation" with him--just see if you can draw it out naturally, like while you are driving in the car or while you are putting him down to bed. Once I knew this was the particular point bothering him, I was able to learn from the teacher that she observed that he was always distracted during writing time, looking at other kids instead of focusing. We together developed a multi-pronged attack. First, we both remind him gently to focus on his work. Just understanding that this is what has been contributing to his slowness has helped my son--he wasn't dumb, of course he was going to finish last if he was goofing off! Second, I got it out of him that he didn't like writing (and therefore was looking for distractions) because he was having trouble with lower case letters--he wasn't confident in all of them. So we set aside 10 minutes a day just to work on those together, and this really helped. My son and I also discussed the other kids comments, and came to decide that his friends didn't mean to be unkind, they were just making an observation (which I think was true--kids just say what they see sometimes with no ill intent.) I think all of this really helped. One thing I'll really highlight is that to the extent your son can figure out what the problem is and come up with ideas to create the solution, that will really help too. My son was so enthusiastic and came up with all sorts of ideas about how he could not get distracted by the other kids, and how to respond when other kids made comments.

If you find you can't zero in on one or two specific issues that are bothering him, then maybe it is time to think of new schools.

As an aside, I also highly recommend Dr. Mel Levine's book A Mind at a Time. It will give you great insight into how each child learns differently, and help you to understand that in order to be able to help your child, you will first have to figure out where their learning process "breaks down." It has really helped me to realize that I need to stop and diagnose the problem before I can fix it, AND that there isn't always a "fix" and that sometimes the best we can do is mitigate and move on.