10 Things A Nursery Nurse Wants To Tell You And She Is Not Allowed

Being a Nursery Nurse is a highly rewarding job and one of the best experiences I have ever had in my life. I was lucky to work for a large daycare company in the UK and with great professionals who really cared about the well being of the children.

However, like any job, it has its pros and cons, and a great deal of it is that we are not allowed to freely discuss some things with the parents about their children fearing their complaints.

This article does not intend to raise voices. My only purpose here is to help parents to understand some things about the day care and the staff that works with your child because after all, these factors will affect the child’s well-being.

1- Keeping your child awake is cruel

Many parents ask that we do not let children sleep because, otherwise, they stay up late and do not fit their work schedules. In the nursery, we understand perfectly how hard it must be to combine your work with being a parent. Because of that, we try to shorten the naps, put the children to sleep earlier and distract them when they are tired… but there are times when children need to sleep.

Sometimes a child is falling asleep while he is sat, and for keeping him awake you have to move him, and he cries because he is tired … Then we feel tremendously bad. We spend time with them, and we care for them, we worry if they are sick and if one day they do not come we miss them. We become an important part of their lives and their well-being, so when some parents forbid us to let them sleep and the child is tired, we feel very bad. Keeping a child awake when he is in this state is cruel.

2. Do not breastfeed your child in the middle of the room.

Nowadays, most day care centers are in favor of breastfeeding, and personally, I think it is something wonderful and gives your child many defenses, so I encourage you completely to do so. The problem comes when you do it in the middle of the room, where other parents come in for their children and feel a bit uncomfortable as they do not all share the same religious values ​​and beliefs. In any case, the main reason is that there are many children in the room, and they know that from the breast comes milk, so suddenly everyone is hungry and everyone wants their parents, so the general mood of the room becomes tense, especially for those who are in transition from the bottle. If you want to breastfeed your child the day care has the moral obligation and the duty to enable a room for it. What’s more, as a teacher, I do not mind going with you and tell you how the day has gone.

I understand that perhaps this is a point where people may disagree and I received some criticism for it. I do not agree with the Law in what it is forbidden to breastfeed in public and that you should go to a bathroom for it. I think it is natural and should not be hidden, especially in places as unhygienic as bathrooms. But since this action affects the rest of the children in the room and their mood, I appeal to your role as parents, because you would not want the same for yours.

3. Your child biting his peers is something serious

If the teacher tells you that your child has bitten a partner is means, probably, he or she has already tried or even done it before. We need you to take it very seriously.

There are many parents that when we tell them that their children bite do not give it any importance and even prevent us from “putting them to think” apart from the rest. It is important to teach children at a young age that you cannot got by hurting others. And it is only a matter of time before your child bites his or her older sibling, another relative or the children of your friends.

One of the main problems is that when a child who starts biting does not stop and bites others several times, those same children end up biting others, learning that there are no consequences. Besides this and depending on the age, they usually suffer a little isolation and the other children do not want to play with them. Obviously, in daycare, we do everything to assure all of them are integrated and we are not allowed to tell other parents who bit their children to avoid labels. But depending on age, children can tell their parents who have been biting and you will find yourself in an embarrassing situation at the very least.

All we ask is that parents take this issue seriously and work together with the day care to minimize these situations that impact your child negatively.

4. Bring enough clothes

Many parents bring their children to the kindergarten with one change of clothes. In many cases, it is not enough. There are many causes why a child may need a change of clothes: a glass of water has been thrown over; The food has fallen on the clothes; The child has participated in some activity with water, mud or paint; He or she has had an accident with the diaper or because they are still learning to use the bathroom; The temperature has gone down or up and the clothes they are wearing make them too cold or too hot; They have fallen and the clothes has become dirty, broken or stained with blood; etc.

That is why we recommend that they carry a minimum of 2 changes. More than three if they are starting to use the toilet because accidents in these situations are very common, reaching an average of 3 in the first few days.

5. No child should be forced to use the bathroom before the age of 2

Connecting to the said above, forcing children to use restrooms before the age of two can bring unpleasant consequences.

Usually, the facilities where the babies stay are not prepared to accomodate the children to the bathroom because they are not expected to be able to take this change well. The way we know that children are ready for change is when they are able to tell us if they have done pee or poop in the diaper because that is when we know they are able to recognize and verbalize, so they will be able to tell us when they need to go to the bathroom.

Forcing a child through this change when they are not even able to verbalize it often has very negative consequences. This causes the children to associate the bathroom with something negative and to develop many problems and delays in adaptation.

Bessi. Pixabay

6. Allow your child to eat birthday cake

There are many parents who are completely against sugar at an early age and it is a very healthy attitude. But when a partner brings a cake to celebrate the birthday and that child is separated from the group for not being able to eat the same, he feels rejected.

Increasingly, parents often ask each other if there are any children in the class who are allergic to an ingredient, or gluten or are not allowed sugar… There are many options and parents could agree to order cakes for everyone. However, if it turns out that your child has a more specific condition, we recommend that you buy healthy cupcakes, store them on the shelf in the nursery and give one to the child while the rest has the cake.

This way, the child does not feel separated from the rest when he has not done anything to deserve it, and can celebrate with his companions.

7. Label your child’s clothing

Although we try, it is impossible for the teachers to keep all the changes that the children bring to the nursery. Normally we remember that they were wearing that day, but there are times when clothes fall from the backpack because they are wide open, or we have help from new staff that is not yet used to the routine and can confuse the backpacks. On one occasion I caught a child who was “organizing” the clothes of several backpacks by colors.

I think that labeling clothes is something very useful that can help both parents and caregivers. That is why I recommend you do it, especially with clothing that may have more sentimental value.

8. If your child has a favorite toy… Buy three!

If your child is one of those children who can not go to kindergarten, eat or sleep without a specific toy… Buy three!

In most of these cases, the toy, usually a stuffed animal like a teddy, has gone astray in the nursery, either because they hide it themselves as part of their game or another child has picked it up believing that it is another toy from the nursery; It has been forgotten in the playground, or the teacher has put it away on a shelf when tidying the room. This last one often happens when the child is new in the daycare and not all caregivers are familiar with the children’s personal toys since in a nursery the toys constantly change. The toy always ends up appearing, but in some cases, the children have left the nursery in tears because it has not appeared before leaving.

With these children, it works well to leave a teddy in the nursery, so they can play with it and leave it there, and there are no problems because at home there is another one. The third one I recommend for traveling. On one occasion I went back to the nursery on a Saturday to pick up the teddy the child has left in the class because the parents did not find the one they had at home and the whole family was going on a trip for a week. A series of circumstances were given so that I could do them this favor, but it is not something that normally happens nor everybody would come back, so I think three is the perfect number.

9. When we do an artistic activity with your child, please, take it.

Few things demoralize so much and so quickly your child’s teacher as not taking home the activities we do with your child. From throwing it to the ground, or taking it out of the backpack (where we put it to make sure they take the activity) and leave it on a table, until saying that they will take it another day to not crumple it… but they never do it.

The activities with your children are one of the parts that we like the most about our work and it is also where we can be creative. We search on the Internet what we can do with them, what they like, what they can and can not do, how to adapt it… Then we organize the materials, in some cases, we even buy them ourselves. We prepare the activity, we do it, we decorate it, we write the names and when the activities are ready, we put them in the backpacks or in a place for the parents to take home with them.

We understand that you are not going to cover the house with the activities and that at that age you will not have a Michelangelo, but when you do not take the activity that we have dedicated so much time to do with the children, it is like saying that you do not to value our work. But this IS our job. So I suggest that you take the activity home, and if it turns out that it is not the one you like the most, you can put it away. In this way, you take care of the relationship with the teacher and she will feel valued and wanting to continue doing things with your child (who enjoys doing them a lot).

10. There are no toys or games for boys or girls.

On more occasions than I would like them to happen, parents prohibit their children from doing certain activities, or play with certain toys for being identified with the opposite gender and believe that exposing themselves to them will create confusion in their sexual identity when they grow up. These situations put the teacher in a difficult position: should you separate the child and do the activity with the rest even if the child feels discrimination? Or do not do the activity with at all and deny everyone else the opportunity to learn something new and in a way that we know, is very beneficial to them?

Usually, most of these requests come from the parents of Boys and are very explicit and sharp as the child can not play with baby dolls, make necklaces of macaroni or costume jewelry, dress themselves up in dresses or play with anything pink. From experience, I can say that children do not have problems of sexual identity associated with these games when they grow up. Playing with dolls can only teach them to be better parents and siblings in the future; Making necklaces with macaroni is a fun way to stimulate creativity and a vision to transform something into something else. And if parents are concerned about this, there are many adult men wearing beaded necklaces, shark teeth or just a chain with a cross as a symbol of their religious beliefs that have no problem of sexual identity. The dressing is not a problem as children understand that they are disguising themselves as someone else. And pink is only one more color. The child does not have the association that pink is for girls, and blue for boys, that is something cultural and not playing with something pink, like a ball, just because it is pink, looks a bit too excessive to me.

The case of Girls is more subtle and is masked by the fact that the parents do not want the girl to play with sand or mud… So that they do not stain their precious white dresses. Personally, I believe that a kindergarten is a space for learning in comfortable clothes and where there are many activities of painting, drawings, shaving foam, pens, sand, water. Here parents should dress their children considering that they can actually enjoy everything that the nursery offers.

On one occasion I had a girl who every day wanted to play with her brother in the sand kitchens. Her mother had said that when she was wearing dresses we must try to encourage her to play with something that won´t stain, what is a very reasonable demand. The problem is that she always came with dresses and brought nothing else for a change. After several weeks insisting, I gave her some spare clothes from the nursery so she could change her dress for the nursery clothes, and when she finished playing she would put the dress back on. All she wanted was to play with her brother.

I was very sorry that the parents did not seem to see that from very young, they were conditioning her. And the girl could not understand why her brother could play with certain things and she could not.

I think that in order to form a more egalitarian world we have to pay attention to this kind of details and ask ourselves, parents and educators alike if we are in any way restraining the possibilities of our children from such an early age.

qimono. Pixabay

This text uses a non-sexist language, and the references to people, collective or positions in this document in masculine or feminine gender, are written as a non-marked grammatical gender.

Begoña Morejon Furest

Written by

Psicóloga, Educadora y Soñadora Incansable

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