Incident at School

Yesterday I received a call from another parent at MOPS asking if her child had pushed Gabriel. Gabriel had not mentioned it and was asleep at the time so I told her I would ask and let her know. With some careful investigation I found out Gabriel had been pushed by this child. His response was that the child "made a bad choice". Now the MOPS teachers and director had taken care of everything by outting the child in time out and letting the mom know what had happened. Gabriel was hurt and probably never would have said anything to me about except I had asked about that particular friend. Anyway the mom was calling because she was having her child make a sorry card for Gabriel and wanted to bring it by. I wasn't here last night when they brought the card to Gabriel but Matt said the child seemed clueless as to what was going on.

Okay so here are my thoughts on the whole thing.

It was very nice for the mom to be concerned and to have her child write draw a picture to apologize but,

It was handled well at school and a 3 year olds memory is only so long.

Children at this age need help finding the words to say during a conflict. In other words the adult should find out what the problem is and help give the child the words to solve the problem. For example: Johnny pushes Sandy down. The adult talks to Sandy and give Sandy words like, "Don't push me. It hurt me when I fell down because you pushed me." And then you talk to Johnny too and find out why he pushed Sandy and give him the words to solve the problem.

I also feel like making a child apologize is not teaching the child anything. You can tell is a child is really sorry for something and just saying the words "I'm sorry" doesn't make it all better. I have seen this so many times with kids who will hit someone or knock something down and say "I'm sorry" and then run off to play like nothing ever happened. It was very apparent that it was not heartfelt.

So those are my thoughts. I do want to say that the mom is doing the best she can and is trying to teach her child empathy and that it's not okay to push. But I just feel like it was handled at school and should have stayed there.