My friend, Cindy, is going through a crisis. Her only son is
entering kindergarten next year, and Cindy is really worried. She’s
the type of mom who worries about stuff long in advance, so I’m
giving her
– and all the other parents who fret about the future – a
heads-up on how to handle the first year of big-boy or big-girl
school.
My friend, Cindy, is going through a crisis. Her only son is entering kindergarten next year, and Cindy is really worried. She’s the type of mom who worries about stuff long in advance, so I’m giving her – and all the other parents who fret about the future – a heads-up on how to handle the first year of big-boy or big-girl school.
1. Once in kindergarten, it’s assumed that all children are FULLY potty-trained. Fully means that your child doesn’t wear emergency Pull-ups and doesn’t believe that the bathroom is just a big playroom with water and soap.
It’s also helpful if mothers of boys introduce their sons to the magical world of urinals. And let’s not even get into urinal cakes. Suffice to say that your son needs to know that despite the name, urinal cakes aren’t edible.
2. The teacher doesn’t care that your full-day kindergartner gave up naps two years ago. In full-day kindergarten, naps are not for recharging the children; they are for giving the teacher something called “quiet time.”
If teachers did not have quiet time, their heads would explode because they spend all day, every day, with hordes of 5-year-olds running around at top speed, pretending they’re fully potty-trained.
3. Kindergarten is full of loss, mostly in the form of sweatshirts, T-shirts and, sometimes, pants. This is because kindergartners are just preschoolers in big-boy underwear. They do not understand the elusive concept of hanging their stuff on the hooks provided by the teacher and then, at the end of the school day, transferring such items to a) their bodies, or b) their backpacks.
By the way, I do not understand why kindergartners lose so many pairs of pants, but I suspect it’s related to the potty-training rule.
4. Kindergartners do not understand the concept of “lost and found.” For them, there is no mythical place where their missing objects sit and wait to be found. Instead, kindergartners have a rule called “finders keepers, losers weepers.”
Let’s say your precious child is out playing on the monkey bars at recess, and suddenly the sun appears and your child becomes uncomfortably hot. Does he or she run all the way back to the classroom – a distance of probably 10 yards – and hang his or her sweatshirt on the hook?
Um, no. About 99 percent of all kindergartners will simply remove the sweatshirt and drop it on the ground. Once it’s on the ground, it’s fair game to any kindergartner who passes by and picks it up. The rule is called “finders keepers, losers weepers” for a reason.
5. Kindergartners love to share. They really do. They love to come into the classroom on sharing day and show off their most prized possessions to their fellow students. Sometimes those possessions will be their favorite “Dora the Explorer” video. Sometimes it will be the priceless tiara passed down in your family for 12 generations.
Either way, you will never see any of the shared objects again because they will be smuggled outside during recess and left lying amid the monkey bars. There, another kindergartner will find them and, according the Kindergartner Rule of Finders Keepers, assume ownership of said objects.
6. While your child is certainly the brightest 5-year-old YOU’VE ever seen, keep in mind that every parent lined up outside the classroom thinks that about their kid, too. And the teacher, who has seen his or her fair share of bright children, will treat them all exactly the same – meaning that your child may not be the one with the most gold stars on the first day of school. Or the second day.
It’s best to learn at this point that you cannot re-live your misspent youth through your child.
7. Your child’s charming habit of talking incessantly will not charm the teacher. This is because at least 14 of the 20 children in the class have this habit. I don’t care if your kid is the most articulate child on the face of the earth. When there are 14 talking at once, nobody can hear them.
8. Take a deep breath. Don’t look at the experience of sending your child to kindergarten as the loss of your child. Look at it as at several free hours where you can do anything you want, including watch “SpongeBob SquarePants” videos, clean the house, get your nails done or go to work. Those hours will fly by more quickly than any hours ever have, and before you know it, it’s time for homework. Even in kindergarten.
