I haven't mentioned this before, but my husband and I have been thinking a lot - and growing increasingly concerned about - my son's ability to socialize with his peers. He's a happy, lively boy at home and with adults and older children, but he's been really hesitant to engage with kids at his preschool. He's often on the outside of the gaggle of kids, watching but not participating.
Now, some of this I can understand. It's not easy to be in a group when your developmental age is characterized by taking toys, tantrums, and spilling juice. But his hesitancy has been worrying us, and we've been on the verge of seeking a professional opinion.
The trouble is, I can completely relate. I hated preschool, and some of my earlier memories are of faking ear aches in order to get out of going. My mom says that one day she dropped me off, returned to the car, and found me sitting in the back seat. My strongest memories of preschool are 1) getting sand in my underpants, and 2) building, by myself, a very, very long train. It's pretty clear that my son is, like me, an introvert.
The challenge for me is figuring out when his behavior is simply a reflection of his true nature (a good thing), and when it's limiting him from doing things he wants to do (a bad thing). As someone who has spent a lot of time trying to force herself to act in ways that don't reflect her nature, I don't want to push too hard, or shame him for being who he is. But recently we've become more convinced that, while he does want to engage with his peers, fear is holding him back.
Until the last couple of weeks. Suddenly he's playing, albeit timidly, with the other kids. He's requesting playdates, and actually playing when we have them. And to my delight, this week his teachers told me that when another boy asked him to play "power hawks" (which consists of running around the play yard with outstretched arms), he agreed. He's never done anything like that before. He did a demonstration of power hawks for us a few nights ago, and as he made loops around the first floor of our house, his arms alternately flapping and gliding, it hit me that he is growing, at his own pace, into a separate person.
Last night my son called his grandmother who lives in California, and she told him a bedtime story over the phone. She said that last week she discovered a bird's nest in a tree in her yard, and she watched as the mother bird fed the babies worms she had caught. "Did the baby birds fly?" my son asked. "No," his grandmother said, "they weren't ready yet." A few days later, his grandmother said, she checked the nest again, and it was empty. The birds had flown.
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