Why is my child ‘better behaved’ at nursery?!
Ever wondered why your child seems to eat well / follow instructions / cooperate with adults / do things for themselves / regulate their emotions (delete as appropriate) at nursery and save all their most difficult behaviours for home? If so, you are most definitely not alone. This is a really common observation by parents of preschoolers. In this article, our headteacher, Alex, looks at the reasons why this might be happening.
Peer pressure:
At preschool, we have the positive benefits of peer pressure working in our favour. Your child is learning how to behave through their observation of others. Refusing to put on their coat to go to the park is much harder to do when all their peers are putting on their coats to go to the park! Seeing the child next to them eating the shepherd’s pie makes them more likely to have a go too.
You can’t really recreate this peer pressure at home. At Two Hands, we have multiple children settling down for a nap in the same room as their friends - they just get into bed and all fall asleep. At home, if you invited another toddler into your child’s room for naptime, it might not go so smoothly!
Desire to impress:
Most little ones form a strong attachment in the early days with at least one favoured adult at preschool. And they really want to impress them. So they bring their best selves to nursery in the hope that they might get some of that praise from that adult and earn their affections.
You don’t get the benefit of this at home because hopefully your child is safe in the knowledge that your love for them is unconditional and not dependent on their behaviour - or whether or not they try asparagus at dinner!
Consistency:
A lot of behaviour from 2-4 year olds is about testing boundaries. They are exploring how adults around them respond, just in the same way that they explore the physical environment. At nursery, we have the advantage of being more consistent in our boundaries with the children than most parents can manage. After all, this is our profession and we have a duty to act professionally. We manage this because we aren’t also trying to get an older child to school, get dinner on the table or answer a work e-mail. Most importantly, other people’s children don’t trigger us in the same way that our own do – and you can take it from us that we aren’t as patient or consistent with our own at home! But at nursery we have consistent preschool rules, regular training on how to respond to different behaviours and it does help. This doesn’t mean we don’t get challenging behaviour; we do. It just often resolves more quickly here because the child is met with the same response every single time.
A world built for them:
At nursery, everything is designed to be age-appropriate. The space, the resources, the routine and the expectations we place on the children.
This can’t be the case at home, where the needs of the 2-4 year old need to be balanced with the needs of the parents, any siblings and indeed the family as a whole. There will naturally be times in home life when the child is expected to wait, sit at the table, stay in a car or a buggy longer than they might want to. They might crave connection from one or both parents, who are temporarily unable to give it. And of course the tools they have to communicate their dissatisfaction look to us adults as misbehaviour.
This isn’t to say that you should change anything, but it might help to offer a different perspective as to why your child shows less of that behaviour at preschool.
There’s no place like home
Finally and perhaps most importantly, for a young child there is no place like home and no one quite like their parents. We want them to feel safe and secure at nursery, but ideally they would feel even safer and more secure at home. That’s why they are their most authentic selves with you – and that means any emotions that they have set aside during the day can come flooding out when you collect them.
It can also happen in reverse, where they use their morning routine to release their emotions, ready to bring their best selves to the adults they feel the need to impress at preschool! All this doesn’t feel like a compliment – but that’s exactly what it is.
In short, you aren’t doing anything wrong. Home life is just different to preschool life and that’s ok!
Work with us: If your child attends Two Hands, we’re here to support you. Everyone faces parenting challenges and we would love to help. You can talk to us at drop off or pick up and arrange a time to have a longer meeting. The more consistency we can achieve between home and school, the better for everyone.
