Perspective of a Working Mom: My Child's Separation Anxiety
December 2016
My three-year-old son had just been pried off my legs by the preschool teacher while he was crying, “mommy, please don’t go.” As I gulped down my tears while driving to my 9:00am work meeting (to which I was going to be late), I thought, “There has to be a better way.”
I had tried everything from playing with him before circle time and distracting him with toys to storing a family photo album in his cubby and promising I would pick him up right after nap-time. Was this normal?
After some research and many discussions, I learned that this was as normal as the kid who cries a little too much after a mini-scrape, or the kid who chooses not to fearlessly jump into the swimming pool. Some kids cry at school drop-offs and have a difficult time with transitions away from their loved ones.
I found lots of articles and blogs that pointed to the values of consistent routines and loving, non-negotiable communication at the time of separation. Yet I couldn’t find a way to talk to my three-year-old in a way that I could assess the level of his daily anxiety (and if it continued throughout the day) and the growth in his coping skills. To make matters stickier, my husband and I had observed other situations where my son masked his emotional discomfort enough to function when needed, but would just release his emotional energy (usually in a massive emotional outburst) when he was safely back at home with us. For example, on several occasions when we left him with his grandparents for a night around ages 2 and 3, he would hold it together well while we were gone; only to cry for an hour in anger when we returned.
One day, in pure desperation, I grabbed a small finger-puppet out of our kitchen junk drawer and told him that today’s drop-off was going to be different because he had a secret super power—a “pocket mommy” (even though it was a tiger puppet) that was going to be in his pocket for the school day. It worked! The drop-off went from hysteria to a sniffle.
Over the course of the next week, we tried the “pocket mommy” idea and talked about it every day after school. I asked what pocket mommy saw and when he wanted to take her out of his pocket. I began to learn through the pocket mommy tool when my son missed me the most.
I found patterns—nap time and line-up times were the worst. The teachers and I talked about the patterns and they found new ways to engage him during those times. In a few weeks, my son was confident not only at drop-off but through the entire day, which allowed him to take emotional risks in making new friends and acquiring new experiences.
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Five years later, I have gained perspective and more parenting experience (with two more kids—ages 7 and 5). My son is now a fifth-grader (10 years old) and once in a while still gets squeamish at drop-off birthday parties or summer camps, but he has a strong vocabulary and is used to talking about his feelings and “junk fears” as we’ve named them. His experience and openness has paved the way for his younger siblings to do the same. In my experience, communication and empathy continues to be our most successful strategy.
