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Home › Articles › Development › Mommy, Don't Go!

Mommy, Don't Go!

Handling Separation Anxiety

By Heather Johnson Durocher

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Nann Ashford remembers all too clearly the heart-wrenching mornings she endured sending her son off to preschool.

"I would have to put him on the bus and buckle him in," Ashford, of Traverse City, Mich., recalls of bidding her 4-year-old son, Alex, good-bye. "He was crying and I would have to leave him on the bus crying. It was horrible."

Teachers told Ashford that her son was fine once he arrived, but she still felt uneasy about the situation. "At home he wouldn't talk about [what he did at preschool] and that scared me," she says.

She also couldn't ignore her son's behavior at daycare later in the day. "He wouldn't nap and he was disruptive," she says, adding that his exhaustion made for chaotic evenings at home.

Alex was experiencing separation anxiety, which behavior experts say is normal, and even healthy, for preschoolers.

Just a Stage
"It's a developmental step that parents have to work through," says Susan Sundeen, an early childhood family education instructor in Woodbury, Minn. "Your child is, all of a sudden, discovering they are separate from you."

A child may show his distress by becoming apprehensive about entering a new setting, not making eye contact with the teacher or caregiver, clinging to his parent or possibly throwing a temper tantrum.

"My sense is it is often a function of a child's personality and temperament," says Barbara Willer, deputy executive director of the National Association for the Education of Young Children. Some children adapt rather quickly while others are "a little more shy, a little more cautious about new situations," she says.

Ashford discovered that her son fell into the latter category. After a month of frustrating mornings at the bus stop, she decided something had to change to make life easier for Alex – and herself. A more consistent schedule did the trick. She placed him into a new daycare providing in-house preschool every day. Ashford found that Alex's behavior changed for the better when he wasn't attending preschool only three mornings a week and at a place separate from his daycare.

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