Is the World Ready for My Child?

For me, the question was never, “Is my child ready for the world?” It has always been a question of whether the world, as a whole, is ready for my son.

I ended up being a little bit of an older mom, compared to my friends and family in the Midwest who started families right after getting married in their early twenties. Ever since agreeing to take on the responsibility of even the idea of getting pregnant, I’ve taken motherhood and my role as a parent very seriously. I knew that my ultimate goal was to raise my baby into a respectable and functioning member of society in adulthood. Sometimes I worry that my own ambition and structure is what has made my experience with parenthood seem so much more difficult than those surrounding me.

I found myself as a lost new mother who didn’t know what she was doing with an infant that seemed just as clueless as to what he was supposed to do as a baby. I’ve never claimed to be an expert and I certainly feel like I’m just figuring every day of my child’s life out one day at a time. I’ve spent every difficult time of his life reading my own self-help books in bed after putting him to bed with a bedtime story of his own. I’ve always wanted to be truly good at this parenthood thing and I’ve worked hard to achieve that, but most days, I feel like a failure.

When JT started school, he was almost five years old entering Transitional Kindergarten through our local school district. Prior to that, he hadn’t stepped foot in a preschool, daycare, or formal classroom so it was a tough transition for him, an only child who had the luxury of a stay-at-home mom for his first five years of his life. The problems began immediately on day one.

Though I had spent our time at home keeping busy with playful activities that would nurture JT’s creativity and curiosity, he also showed signs of a higher level of intelligence that I wasn’t prepared to parent. He easily understood the STEM concepts taught on his favorite Nick Jr show, Blaze and the Monster Machines, and possessed a confidence I had never experienced personally, even as an adult. He corrected my mistakes if I read the wrong word in a book we were sharing. He craved order and routine, often getting upset if there was a change in plans or a request for him to immediately stop his activity so that we could transition to something else.

I was very nervous about leaving him in the hands of someone new that he didn’t know at all on day one at his new school. When I went to pick him up, only three short hours later, he was hiding under a table and I had to crouch down to see him for myself and coax him out of his hiding spot. His teacher let me know that he had a difficult time and asked a variety of insulting questions such as:
Do you read books to him?
Has he seen a pediatrician?
Is there something wrong with him?

I took JT home and jotted down some notes to myself about the interaction with the teacher, thinking I might need to refer to them at another opportunity. The following day, I watched on helplessly as my son slowly attempted to follow a line of classmates for the first time in his life only to stand back with so much apprehension that he ended up being left alone in the breezeway of the open elementary school courtyard as his classroom door shut with everyone but him inside. A teacher from another classroom happened to be walking by and assisted to get him back into his classroom and something told me that the day wasn’t going to end well. I received a call from the school principal only an hour later and much to my surprise, she insisted that I return to the school to pick up my son and take him home because he had made numerous attempts to run out of the classroom and was now considered a safety risk.

I had had enough after two days. I wrote up a formal request for JT to be transferred to another school in the area and hand delivered it to the Superintendent’s office. It took a couple days but he was placed in another school in the neighborhood where I was told by the next teacher that he would be a wonderful addition to their classroom. He continued to struggle with impulse control and self-regulation, terms I’ve come quite familiar with now but wasn’t sure what they were labeled back then when it was just a meeting with school officials to discuss JT’s tantrums and throwing of classroom items, including chairs and scissors.

It’s been a long road. None of it has been easy. And JT’s school experience has only just begun. He’s currently a second grader participating in Distance Learning from home. He’s bored out of his mind with sitting on video calls rather than in a classroom of his peers. We continue to work with his school and teacher to develop a plan of success for him as an advanced student and we all look forward to him returning to the classroom and spending time with friends once again. That’s the biggest thing he misses about all of this – his friends.

I still look back and wonder about all the “what ifs.” What if I had put him in preschool and returned to work? What if I had given him a sibling? What if this was just who he was always meant to be? I don’t have answers to those questions, but I have a feeling that the son I got is exactly who was meant for me and I couldn’t be more proud that I was chosen to take on such a big role in shaping him.

For more Information on When Do Kids Start Preschool, check out my post on the Zulily blog!