I had no idea daughter hated school until she started eating baby food & having night terrors – here’s how we fixed it
MUM-OF-TWO Julie Cook, 45, a writer from Southampton, had no idea her daughter Adriana, nine, was unhappy.
Here she reveals how she managed to fix her daughter’s struggles at school.
She says: “Adriana was always happy at school and skipped in without looking back.
But around 18 months ago, when she was in Year 3, she started complaining of tummy aches before lessons.
I kept her off one day, then another. But then I noticed a pattern: This was happening every few days and she would be fine on weekends.
I would ask her questions like, “What’s the matter, don’t you like school?”
But she would shrug and change the subject and I hoped it would be something that passed.
But then she started eating differently. Instead of having whatever I made, she’d demand soft “baby” foods like mashed potato or cauliflower cheese, things that were comforting but were also things she’d loved as a toddler.
My husband Cornel and I couldn’t work out what was going on.
Then she started waking at night and having night terrors – bad dreams that she felt were real.
Adriana is a clever child and liked to write her own stories. She’d take them in to show her teacher but sometimes come out in tears, telling me the teacher didn’t have time to look at it. She also began complaining about the noise in the class.
There were more than 30 children and she said how overwhelming she found it.
Then the “tummy aches” increased too and it suddenly started to make sense. She wasn’t ill or reverting to babyhood, she simply wasn’t happy at school.
I sat her down and she explained she found it too noisy with 30 kids competing for attention and was hurt and upset that no matter what she did at home with her writing, the teacher barely had time to look at the extra things she did.
It explained the tummy aches and not wanting to go in, and the reverting to food she’d loved as a baby.
I wondered if she was seeking comfort in what was a stressful school day.
We ended up moving Adriana to a school with smaller class sizes and here she was encouraged to bring in things she had done at home.
Suddenly all the signs I’d noticed disappeared. She started eating normal meals again, the night terrors stopped and the tummy aches vanished.
Now she’s been at the new school for just over a year and is skipping through those school gates. I’d urge other parents to look out for odd or unusual signs in their children.
They can’t always express how they feel about school and their feelings might come out in other ways, such as how they eat, how they sleep or faking illnesses.
I’m glad we worked out what was going on with Adriana.
She’s much happier.”