Opinion: To the point - Why not make a fuss?

I am sitting at the desk by the front door of the nursery where I'm thehead, and I hear crying, then a clatter of doors. A mother comes past,glances at me and says 'oh no, I timed that all wrong'. She had settledher little boy in with his key person, she explains. He was playinghappily and she started to move away. If she had just left then, itwould have all been alright. But she had waited a few more minutes, thenhe had looked round at her and become distressed as she started toleave. I reassure her and say that her child's key person can phonelater in the morning to say how things are going.

As expected, the child settled after a while. But it made me wonderabout whether there really is a knack to getting the timing just rightwhen you drop your child off. It is so easy to feel you are getting itwrong at either extreme - hurrying off too fast, or hanging around andcausing your anxieties to rub off on your child. It also struck me thatin nurseries we often put a lot of emphasis on calmness, and a generalcheerfulness. If you're the parent whose child cries and gets upset, itmust be easy to feel that all eyes are on you, that your child is makinga fuss or you are getting it all wrong.

Perhaps there is something of a myth about the ideal drop-off innurseries. I wonder what it might sometimes cost a child, to come andsettle in 'without a fuss'? Sometimes children can seem quite startledearly in the morning, or seem unusually subdued during the day, as ifthey did not really have time to find their place and adjust to being innursery.

The little boy might not have cried if his mother had left more quickly,but who would have benefited in the end? We can put a lot of emphasis onchildren being sensible, big boys and girls who can let their parents gowithout making a fuss, but in the end this is only better for childrenin the sense, as Anna Freud argued, that 'we would all be better off,i.e., more sensible, without emotions'. We would do better to allowchildren to go through what she called 'the painful and often disturbingprocess of learning how to deal with such emotions'.

Julian Grenier is head of Kate Greenaway Nursery School and Children'sCentre, London.