4yo with separation anxiety Post Reply

[kah]

I'm hoping for advice from anyone with experience of this. My four year old daughter has recently developed severe separation anxiety. She has always been a mummy's girl and been very clingy but has been happy enough being dropped off at pre-school or being looked after by her grandparents. For the last couple of weeks though she has become hysterical every time I've needed to leave her.

She's a shy child who finds it difficult to socialise in a big noisy pre-school environment but has made friends with a few of the quieter children. Her ability to socialise has really gone downhill though as a lot of the children say silly thoughtless thing to each other like "I don't want to be your friend', "you can't play with me", and she's taking this completely to heart to the point that she can't bring herself to approach other children for fear of being rejected.

She'll be starting 'big school' in September which must be weighing on her mind. I spend a lot of time talking and listening to her to try and understand her anxieties but she is struggling to understand them herself and thinks that it's just because she wants to be with me all of the time.

I'd love to hear from anyone else who is going through this or has gone through it and what you're doing/did to help your child at this terribly distressing time for them.

Thank you so much.

[lalectrice]

I can sympathise with this, having a three-year-old who is very Mummyish and anxious about new situations, being left with other people etc. In our case, I found role play extremely helpful when it came to tackling preschool. In our safe, friendly home environment we did absolutely loads of it, repeating situations again and again and gradually varying roles at her instigation. So, for e.g., she was herself and I was, variously, the mummy, the teacher and another child (a friendly one and on other occasions one who snatched or said something nasty). Eventually she gained the confidence to try out being those characters too. We repeated identical or similar scenarios many times over a period of weeks (pretty boring for you, I'm afraid!) and I was amazed at how effective it was at empowering her to feel more confident and in control of the situation, as well as allowing her to experiment with different types of response or situation. She also really enjoyed the role play from a creative perspective. I've since tried the same thing before other scary situations, like getting her booster shot at the doctor's, and been delighted at how well it works.