My kid and notes from Year 4.8
November 18, 2019
Thinking ahead to kindergarten / elementary school
Kindergarten is 8:30-1:30. Grades 1-5 is 8:30-2:30. Spring break is a week, Thanksgiving is 3 days off, Winter Break is two weeks. Summer is 10 weeks.
How on Earth do working parents deal with that????
Aftercare and summer camps for summer, I guess. But I hate the mental load that we’re going to have to take on for that and honestly I’m not thrilled with the idea of trusting my 5 year old to various groups I have to get to know before I feel like they’re trustworthy.
I’m feeling obligated to just pick up JB and keep zir home with me while I work. For kindergarten, it’s just one academic year, and that’s just … about 5 hours to fill before PiC gets home and we need to do the dinner/bath/bed trio. Hm. Hm. Hm. I’m not sure. Note – the obligation is entirely in my own mind. PiC is investigating aftercare options.
He’ll support me if that’s what I really want but he’s really in favor of getting aftercare. I suspect I just don’t want it because I hate having to get to know and trust new people all over again.
My parents never had childcare really, it was all on Mom’s shoulders to drop us off, pick us up, feed us, and everything in between. That meant that sometimes we were left waiting an awfully long time to be picked up after school as she was stuck at work late most days. I remember sitting outside the elementary school under a tree, reading a stack of books, waiting for hours hoping she hadn’t forgotten me entirely.
I’m not trying to reproduce that situation, taking it all on my shoulders, and PiC wouldn’t let me anyway. But I still feel this pull to keep JB home with me after school and I haven’t parsed out why, precisely.
When is it “tattling”?
I need to do a better job of differentiating between when I want JB to tell us about someone doing something wrong and when it’s not necessary or appropriate. We have been encouraging zir to resolve differences with the kids in question, which ze is getting better at, but we also need to discuss what things fall under “don’t tattle” (when it’s not causing anyone harm, and it’s just an annoyance that someone isn’t following the rules) and what falls under reporting actual harm.
This immediate “don’t tattle” admonishment was giving me hives because it’s too all-encompassing and I didn’t like that feeling of just telling a kid those two words without further explanation. Like this author, I don’t want to feed into a culture of silence for lacking nuance.
This was a helpful resource.
Because here’s the thing – we don’t want kids to lie, but we also don’t want them “snitching” when other kids do something wrong. How are they going to know what to do and when without more specific guidance? For example, when accused of wrongdoing and they know another kid did it, are they supposed to tell us the truth or stonewall? Personally, I always want the truth whether or not I’m going to be the one authorized to follow up on the other kid, but people call that snitching. What’s your take?
We’ve been talking about the nuance with JB, and ze recently brought up a situation between two classmates and asked, “Was that tattling?” So we’re thinking about it, at least.
Precious Moments
Another circle of life
JB: mom, do Lions eat zebras?
Me: Yes if they can catch them.
JB: Then they EAT them! *gasp*
PiC: There was a Wildkratts book about that.
Me: What does it say?
JB: That.
Me: Oh.
PiC: It’s called Lion Pride. They also talk about honey badgers.
Me: What about honey badgers?
PiC: Lions don’t mess with them.
Me: Why not?
JB: Because they will BADGE them.
Me: Yeah … that’s no good for anyone.
Me in bed after a rough day and night
JB: Hi Mom! You can take as much as you need in bed. But don’t take too much time, or else you might not come with us!
5 minutes later…
JB *bursting in*: Mom. Mom. Can I have … Mom, are you …. Mom where’s your head???
Me: *should I tell zir I’m in the bathroom?*
Priorities
Me: It’s taco night!
JB: I don’t LIKE tacos!
Me: -____-
PiC: Ok, can I have your tacos?
JB backpedaling: But … I need da pwotein!
My mom was home until I turned nine then she got a job and let me be a latch key kid. A neighbor was home if I needed anything so I often when to her place and played with her daughter. We are trying to figure out the after school situation ourselves. I’m considering part time work rather than full time work so I can pick up the kids after school. Or maybe remote work so I can be around in the late afternoons. I have no idea what I’ll find once I start looking.
Do you have an idea of what you’d ideally want?
My kids LOVE(D) our after school program. LOVE IT. As in, don’t/didn’t want to leave when it’s time to go. Mommy why can’t you pick me up later?
Tell someone and Use your words are now “in” so we have thankfully not had to deal with our children being admonished for “tattling”. Back at the wonderful daycare that went out of business, they’d use telling a teacher as a way to model for the children to work out their differences with teacher facilitation until they were able to do it on their own without teacher facilitation. K-4 there’s less of that, but they also don’t punish children for telling things.
I really don’t think that kids are capable of understanding the nuance. There are so many things in retrospect I should have told adults but never did because I’d been told not to tattle. My suggestion: don’t use the words tattle or snitch. Encourage kids to protect themselves by letting an adult know if they’re being harmed. Encourage kids to let an adult know if something dangerous is happening. I don’t think the other stuff needs to be addressed at all– it’s just confusing for the kid.
I have been a latchkey kid and was fine with it, but I understand that’s not allowed now at the ages I was latchkey and thankfully we have money and after school programs.
We come down heavy on the “always tell an adult” side, and then as they get older we help them learn to assess their own motivation as a way to weed out tattling. Telling me because you’re worried about someone’s safety? That’s awesome. Telling me because you’re irritated with them and want to manipulate an adult into punishing them? Not so great. Let’s have a chat about kindness.
I have NEVER understood some people’s pretence that snitching is a bad thing. Think about it; the only time you would be worried about someone snitching on you is if you did something wrong. At which point you are trying to say that loyalty is more important than truth & safety. Which is exactly the mindset that keeps some domestic violence and sexual assault victims silent, and police officers protecting others guilty of police brutality. Now, sometimes witnesses choose silence as a rational choice because they are being explicitly or implicitly blackmailed into it – but I think we need to be honest about the ugliness that’s happening there, not let offenders hide behind some virtuous drivel about “not liking snitches”.
“Telling me because you’re irritated with them and want to manipulate an adult into punishing them?”
I genuinely think little kids cannot separate this from just telling an adult when something is wrong. They do not generally know which rules are important or why (maybe with the exception of a few major things like biting/hitting). It seems really arbitrary to a kid when they’re punished for reporting some things but not others.
Growing up, I always thought so long as I wasn’t being physically harmed I had to keep it to myself. I could have avoided a lot of bullying, including really misogynist stuff as late as 8th grade if I had realized adults would support me instead of punishing me. This all stems from my being punished for tattling as a 3 year old (and later reinforcement, no doubt).
“…then AS THEY GET OLDER we help them learn to assess their own motivation as a way to weed out tattling.” [emphasis added]
This kind of self-awareness is something to grow into slowly and usually takes help. My five year old is waaay too young, so we simply acknowledge her info whether or not we choose to act on it. But my ten year old occasionally (not every time, just once in a while!) gets walked through questions like these: Are they hurting someone or putting someone in danger? Are they damaging something? Are they breaking an actual rule or just not doing what you want them to do? What are you hoping [parent] will do?
Learning to think through the Why’s of our own actions is important. If the root of the problem is actually injustice, learning how to put that into words and appeal directly to their friends first is a good life skill. If the real problem is danger to self or to someone else, then the adult giving positive reinforcement for that awareness encourages appropriate reporting. If the real issue is anger at not being able to control others, then it’s time to talk about respecting other’s appropriate boundaries.
I agree with N&M that this isn’t possible for *little* kids to know the difference for this one: “Telling me because you’re irritated with them and want to manipulate an adult into punishing them?”
But I do see that you didn’t do that until they were older. How old were yours when you started that nuance?
I think part of this is a communication misunderstanding. I’m not expecting six year olds to understand the words “motivation” or “manipulate”! But even kindergartners can sometimes acknowledge that they only told the teacher XYZ because they wanted *name* to get in trouble. And that doing that wasn’t kind.
How soon we started talking about it varied by personality & attitude. I think my oldest was around 7-8 when we first started. My middle child is unusually self-aware & mature for her age, so we had our first gentle talks about obvious tattles when she was only 6-7. Both of them understood fairly quickly what the difference was. Now that they’re 10 & 8 they still usually report everything we need to know regarding danger, damage, rule breaking, and situations they just feel uncomfortable about – and yes sometimes there’s a bit more Schadenfreude than others – but they rarely use tattling for meanness.
I expect we might have more challenges with the youngest tattling though, because when your “opponents” are so much bigger & older than you – it’s a lot more tempting to use every weapon you have!
I think I got what you meant, I was just interested to know when your kids were able to start understanding the concept at all because for us, practically speaking, it’s easy to forget that this kid parrots all the things we say but that doesn’t mean ze ACTUALLY understands the concept. So I’m hoping to guide toward the same result that you’re going for: tell me all the things but skip the stuff that’s just about being mean.
I do not think my 7 year old is at a point where zie would really understand the difference, and zie is pretty socially ept for a 7 year old.
This morning zie told me that I wasn’t supposed to be eating breakfast in the living room. (This is true– nobody is supposed to be eating in the living room.) Zie wasn’t trying to get me in trouble with myself. Yet, when zie says the same thing about hir sibling I might think zie was trying to get DC1 in trouble.
Really I think often they want to know what the limits of the rules are. They want things to be fair. They want to be able to do things that other kids are doing. There are a lot of reasons they “tell” on people that aren’t just about getting kids in trouble that could be misinterpreted by adults as such.
I had these same apprehensions when we started daycare so I KNOW it’s a me thing. I’ll likely be more ok if we have an established formal program to use because Sense’s situation below is very much something I worry about if we were to go any kind of sitter route outside the home.
There was always someone at home when I came home from school, but this was in the 1960s and was typical. I can’t say I was particularly enriched by having a stay-at-home parent though. 🙂 I mostly went to my room and read.
For my kids we had an after-school program run on the school campus by the YMCA. It was terrific. Time to do their homework, playtime, even field trips once a week. They ran the summer program all day long. I did have to make arrangements for holidays and such, but sometimes I’d bring them to work with me and we’d make it a special day for them to see how mom spent her day. They enjoyed that.
The YMCA sounds like a fantastic option! Unfortunately ours is too far away for it to be a daily option.
My mom was a stay-at-home mom, so she was home when we got home from school. That’s not an option for us for a whole bunch of reasons. We have had a variety of approaches to after-school care, and honestly it’s so long that I think I need to write a blog post about it. Right now Baguette attends one school and is bused to another for the after-school program, and that works for all of us–including Baguette, who loves riding the bus.
Home with mom until she went back to work when I was young (3 or 4?), then with an aunt that died before I made firm memories of her. Then we got stuck with an older lady babysitter after school a few streets from where I lived. She was mean and abusive, and her (adult) kids were worse, which then made her grandkids even worse still. I don’t say this lightly or often, but the adults were all trash and it was a very unhealthy environment for kids to be in. (I feel like I can’t blame the grandkids since they didn’t have agency, either, but still kind of do.)
Mom quit work when I was about 11, and she stayed home for a few years until college approached and she went back to work to help pay for it. By the time she quit, I was old enough to take care of myself and my sister for a few hours and there was no need for us to have a baby sitter anyway. It was kind of backwards, but I guess nice because she could shuttle us to/from various activities, doctor’s appts (LOTS of orthodontia!), and helped us a ton with our homework? Honestly, I wouldn’t have minded being a latchkey kid in HS. I would have done the exact same thing as when my mom was home–read books and do my homework.
But I really could have used my mom being home in my younger years, instead of later (finances demanded that my mom work earlier on). Some traumatic things happened at that babysitter’s house, which started a spiral that is still going on today. So I hear you about trusting new people and teaching appropriate tattling. I’d think a group day care situation would be better/more liable than a private babysitter like we had?
I had a SAHM until my parents divorced when I was 10, then a rotating cast of au pairs until I was 11 or 12. The au pairs were because I’m the oldest of four kids and the next two down would never listen to me if I was solely in charge. After the au pairs we were all latchkey.
I remember the SAHM time as being the best, mainly because things weren’t chaotic. The au pairs weren’t great– they mainly smoked cigarettes, watched soap operas, and broke up fights between my brothers. We stopped having them after one of them cursed us out. I think the latchkey era would have been fine with me if I was alone in the house but my brothers spent the whole time wrestling and playing video games and the fights between them routinely got out of hand. I got a daily after school job as soon as I could, which took me out of the environment entirely. The chaos continued for the other three, though. We’re all fine adults, but I don’t think it was a good set-up.
My own daughter, currently 3, is in daycare so that I can work, and I work from home. I’m not so worried about aftercare once she starts school–I’m expecting the local school’s aftercare to be fine. I am worried about summers. I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect a 5-year-old to do things on her own while I stick to my office having conference calls and getting things done. I think that’s a recipe for interruptions and general unhappiness. At the same time, though, the local options for camps consist entirely of sports things (mostly gymnastics) and a county program where the kids mostly go to amusement parks. I’ve been told that none of the camps accommodate a full workday, either– they’re all 8-3, 9-4 stuff. I’m anti-gymnastics for young kids and don’t love the mental candy diet that the county program seems to be.
I genuinely don’t know what I’m going to do when daycare is no longer an option. What I would really like for her summers in the elementary years would be an age-adjusted version of what she’s doing in daycare, where she gets a smattering of physical and mental activities. She’s engaged and happy there, and it’s a good mix.
My parents used every type of childcare there was. We lucked out with a babysitter that worked with us for many years before we were all school aged and also many summers. She was fantastic, and brought her own kids with her (she was pregnant with her first when hired), and we sorta grew up with bonus siblings.
We went to day care center briefly, had some time in an in home daycare (or maybe it was just a lady who watched us?). For a few early elementary years, we went over to a friends house after school. My mom had advertised for an after school baby sitter, and I remember advocating for my classmates mom when she “applied”. The classmate became my elementary school BFF, so that was excellent.
I don’t remember what age we started being home alone after school. We took the school bus from a young age, but there was someone (babysitter or otherwise) there until some age. All of my child care experiences were very positive. We had a one or two summer babysitters that were sorta duds, but nothing seriously wrong other than them being seemingly bratty teenagers / college students.
The general approach by working parents here is after-care during the school year, followed by a summer of “day camps”, which also often need after care because they aren’t naturally full day. There is an excellent variety of camps available. I’m also a little apprehensive about after-care for a 5 year old, but we’ll assess our options when the time comes. I also hear after care can be tough to get into with demand exceeding supply. Typical.
Five hours sounds like a long time… Would be nice if you had someone in a similar situation, and you could trade off or something! Our school hours are similar, though seem to start a little later and end a little later (e.g. 9ish to 3ish for older grades), which would work well for us. But then it looks like they randomly get out an hour early every single Wednesday…
As kids me and both my brother and sister never had to go to an after school program because we were lucky to have grandparents to pick us up from school and watch over us until our parents came home from work. My grandparents we’re living with us and that helped even more to cut down on transport, no need for my parents to pick us up when all of us we’re living in one roof.
Now that we have kids of our own, we are planning to take them to the school where my sister in-law is the principal so we have a trusted person to watch them until we get off work. We hope that she is the principal when both of them are going to school but of course you can never predict what will happen in the next few years!!
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