Momentum is crucial.
After a week of holidays, my preschool daughter, J, had lost the momentum of going to kindergarten. On the first day after the school reopened, she told me this with sadness in her eyes:
I don’t want to go to school.
Oh! Poor thing.
For a moment, my heart sank. The last thing parents want to hear is this scary statement.
“What would you do if you don’t go to school?”
“Why did you say that?”
“You don’t like school anymore?”
“What about your friends? Don’t you miss them?”
And many more questions that I wanted to ask J. But I didn’t because I knew it was not going to help a single thing.
And I didn’t want to force her either.
But I knew she liked school. I suggested this to her.
“Why not you give yourself 2-3 days? For this period, you just go to school as normal. After 2 or 3 days and you still don’t feel like going to school, then we can talk about it again. What do you think?”
I didn’t know whether this was going to work. My intention was to get her momentum going by allowing her to experience again what school life was about before she made a hasty decision. Hopefully, by then, she would have forgotten what she had said about school.
To her, the suggestion seemed fair and there was no reason for her not to accept it. I was glad as I solved this problem without using force or threat or bribe.
Did it work? You bet. It worked as planned and she now enjoys her kindergarten every minute of the day.
