Journey to Preschool, Part 4: Steps Forward and Back
Follow Alaina and her family as she starts preschool for the first time.
Read along as Brooklyn, NY mom Rachel Chou recounts her experiences as her daughter, Alaina, starts preschool. Child development expert Adele M. Brodkin, Ph.D., adds her observations and comments.
Pretend Friends
In my last journal entry, I wrote about recent developments in Alaina's social interaction with her friends, and the beginning of interest in imaginary play. Since then Alaina has become best of friends with "Kati" and "Yeh-Yeh-Eeh", her pretend playmates.
Her friendships with Kati and Yeh-Yeh-Eeh began one night at dinner when, in an effort to get her to finish her vegetables, we pretended that Alaina's pieces of broccoli were members of a family. We talked about the baby pieces being her cousins Julia and Hannah and the big one being their mommy. Alaina suddenly said, "Oh, Yeh-Yeh-Eeh wants to join his family." From that night forward Yeh-Yeh-Eeh became a fixture in our household. Soon afterwards, another imaginary friend named Kati turned up. Now, at mealtimes, there are often two extra chairs set aside for the pair. They travel with us in the car and sleep next to Alaina in her room.
Dr. Brodkin: Having imaginary companions is especially common among highly verbal, alert kids with rich imaginations — particularly those who thrive on communicating and relating.
Alaina plays with her new friends much the way she used to play with her stuffed animals and baby dolls. She reads them stories, tucks them into bed, helps them go potty, and feeds them. Forty-five minutes can be spent replaying the day's activities over and over again, with Alaina playing the role of mommy. The rituals of everyday life are endlessly fascinating to her.
When I ask Alaina about her day at school, she now tells me about what she did, adding commentary about what Yeh-Yeh-Eeh and Kati were up to as well. She mixes descriptions of them with descriptions of her real friends. So Alaina's world of friends now consists of real, real-imaginary (her dolls and stuffed animals), and totally imaginary individuals. It can be very confusing for her poor parents!
Along with this expanding group of friends, Alaina has become increasingly fascinated with dress-up and dramatic play. At home she constantly wears tutus and dresses, party shoes, and her "ballet slippers" (which are actually her summer sandals). She loves to play music and pretend she's at ballet class. When she started school in the fall, she had little interest in the costumes in the dress up corner of the classroom. Now, she spends much of her time there dressing up in costumes, and trying to persuade a classmate or an unsuspecting adult to don a dress.
Potty Problems
A less endearing development has been Alaina's regression with her potty training. She has been fully potty trained since before her second birthday. For months, she rarely had an accident. But last fall, we began to notice a pattern of more frequent accidents. We always ascribed this to the impending arrival of her baby brother (she was also, at this time, obsessed with pretending she was a newborn baby). These accidents diminished soon after her brother was born. Recently, though, as we head toward spring, the number of accidents has suddenly spiked again. They tend to occur when Alaina is preoccupied with her play and simply doesn't want to take the time to go to the bathroom. Yesterday, I made a "potty chart" for her and put it up in her room. She gets a sticker at the end of every day she doesn't have an accident, and a present for each week without accidents. We'll see what happens…
The other day when my husband and I picked Alaina up from school, we had a chance to chat with her teachers. We discovered something really interesting: Alaina has never mentioned Yeh-Yeh-Eeh or Kati to either of them, and she still hasn't had a single potty accident while at school. I'm not sure exactly what this means, if anything; perhaps Alaina has started to develop her own idea about the behaviors that are appropriate in different contexts. I even wonder whether she has already started to become conscious of how her classmates and teachers perceive her, and whether this might explain why she saves her accidents for home.
