The week she started school
Nobody warned me about the fourth day. The first three were fine — she was fine, I was fine, everyone was fine — and then on Thursday the whole thing arrived at once, for both of us.
She was ready. That’s the part I want to say first, because everything that follows sounds like it wasn’t, and it was.
Monday was good. She walked in without looking back, which I had braced for and which still went through me like a bar of cold. Tuesday was good. Wednesday she was quiet in the car and ate two dinners.
Thursday she came out of the classroom door, saw me, and her face did the thing where it holds for about a second and a half and then goes. She cried from the door to the car park and then in the car and then, briefly, at half past six, about a sock.
Why the fourth day
I asked three other parents and they all had a fourth day. One had a Tuesday-of-week-two, which I think is the same thing running late.
It makes sense once you’ve seen it. She had been good for four days. Good in the way that costs a four-year-old everything: sitting on a carpet, queuing, not touching things, working out where the toilet is, being one of thirty. She held all of that together for six hours a day and then handed the whole lot to me at the gate, because I’m the person you can hand it to.
Nobody misbehaves at school and then comes home lovely. It’s the other way round, and it was a relief to know that before it happened rather than after.
What we changed by Friday
Food in her hand within about four minutes of coming out. Not a snack in the bag for later — actually in her hand, before the car. A banana or a bit of flapjack. The difference this made was so large that I distrust it, and I have done it every day since.
And no questions. I had a whole clever list of good questions, the kind that are supposed to get more than one word: what made you laugh, who did you sit with. She didn’t want any of them. What she wanted was to sit in the back and stare out of the window, and then to tell me, in the bath, about a boy who had a nosebleed on Tuesday, information she had been sitting on for three days.
The two things I’d do differently
I made a special breakfast on the Monday. Pancakes, the works. It was lovely and it was a mistake — it made the morning feel unlike a morning, and unfamiliar was the exact thing we didn’t need more of. This year we had toast, the same as every other day, and went out of the door at the same time.
And I booked something for the Friday. A treat, to mark the end of the week. By Friday she could barely stand up, and I’d built a thing she was now obliged to be pleased about on the one afternoon she had nothing left. We went home instead and she fell asleep on the sofa at ten past five in her uniform.
The mornings took another two months to sort out, and that is a separate note. So did the reading book, which arrived in week three and became its own small war.
The bit I didn’t expect
I was fine at the gate. I was completely fine at the gate, both times, and I want that on the record because I’d been told I wouldn’t be.
Where I wasn’t fine was Wednesday afternoon in the kitchen, on my own, holding a pair of her shoes.
Things people email to ask
- What should I expect in the first week of reception?
- Expect the crash to come late. Most children hold it together for the first two or three days and then fall apart on the fourth, when the novelty has gone and the tiredness has not. Ours was cheerful on Monday and unrecognisable by Thursday teatime, and every parent I spoke to at the gate described roughly the same shape.
- Why is my child so tired and badly behaved after starting school?
- Because they have been well behaved all day and it costs them everything. School asks a four- or five-year-old to hold themselves together for six hours among thirty other children, and the person they let go with is you, at four o’clock, in a corridor. It is not a sign it is going badly. Ours was a different child by half past five.
- How do you handle a difficult school drop-off?
- Keep it short and keep it identical. The long, reassuring goodbye is the one that makes it worse, because it tells a child there is something here worth being reassured about. We use the same five words every morning, hand her over, and go. Arriving early enough to stand about for a few minutes helped more than anything we said.
- What should I ask my child about their school day?
- Not “what did you do today”. It got four days of “nothing” and then tears. What works here is food first, no questions for an hour, and then the information arrives sideways in the bath — usually about somebody else, usually not the thing you were asking about. If you want a specific answer, ask about one small thing, like who they sat next to at lunch.
Anna
Mid-thirties, former magazine copy editor, now works part-time from the kitchen table. Started this as a private record and only made it public because friends kept asking for the recipes.
If this was any use
The reading book that comes home every night
Ten minutes a night, says the school. What we had by half term was ten minutes of misery a night, four nights a week, and a child who had worked out that books were something that happened to her.
Packed lunches, after two terms of getting them back
For two terms I made a nice lunch and it came home. Not some of it — the same three things, every day, in the same box, having travelled to school and back untouched.
Breakfast, for people who are not morning people
Four people, twenty minutes, and nobody in this house is at their best before about nine. What survived is three things on rotation, all of which can be eaten by somebody who is not fully awake.
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