PARENTING : PARENTS SHOULD START EARLY TO PREPARE KIDS FOR SCHOOL.

Byline: Greg Steckler and Gerald Deskin 

The good news is that you can do a lot to get your child ready for school for the first time. The bad news is that you need to start long before your child is of school age. Children who have attended preschool have an easier time adjusting to kindergarten but still have to learn to adjust to a new environment with new rules and new demands.

Early in a child's life, parents need to teach children important tasks such as learning to follow directions and obey the teacher. They learn this task by learning to obey parents without questioning their authority. Parents, in an attempt to be loving and caring, sometimes forget that the teacher, whose directions must be followed, is a parent surrogate.

Children need to learn to become a member of the class rather than just expressing their own individuality. Among other things, they must learn self-control. This means staying in their seat and following directions. In a class of 20 or more children, the teacher needs to maintain control since there is not sufficient time to spend on each child alone. In order to learn to fit into the class, the child must learn to follow directions.

If parents accept tantrums and difficult behavior, the child will have difficulty accepting the new situation. This is, in part, a normal striving toward independence and doing things they want to do when they want to do them. Still, the tendency must be curbed if the child is to learn to be a student.

One of the best ways to train a child's readiness for school is to talk about what is going to be demanded of them in the classroom. The child will have to adjust very quickly to new authority figures, new friends and new work. For children who have only been told what to do by their parents, this is sometimes a problem.

Separation anxiety is another common problem for children who are attending school for the first time. Parents can help by teaching their children that someone will always pick them up from school. From an early age, children who sleep over at other children's houses, or who learn they will always be picked up from wherever they are, have less anxiety about separating from their parents. Driving to the new school and allowing the child to see their classrooms, if possible, also tends to lessen anxiety.

The pressures of new demands by a teacher may also create anxiety. Sometimes, for the first time children are not only doing new work, but that work is graded. They bring their papers home for their parents to see, and often this work is not perfect. Children have to get used to what may be a new idea: that learning involves both successes and failures and that this is normal part of learning. Parents can help by explaining to their child that, rather than seeking perfect papers, it is important to try to do one's best.

Parents can help by discussing what happens in school daily and finding where the child is having problems. Is it in accepting the rules and limits of the new situation? Is it the ability to organize one's work? Or is it some other aspect of school that may seem obvious to the child but not the parent?

Suggestions for parents:

1. Prepare your child before he or she gets to school in learning the tasks that will be demanded.

2. Talk to your child daily about what happened at school and reassure him or her that as long as they try their best, the problems will be resolved.

3. Take your cue from your child about what is the current problem and discuss ways of dealing with it.