The Toddler

I've been wanting to write about this friend since the first day or two of school, but have hesitated because I just don't know how to approach it. She's a darling little sprite of a girl, with tangled brown hair, huge brown eyes, and toothpick thin arms and legs. The youngest of seven, she has been at home with Mom her entire life and has never even been left with a babysitter outside of immediate family members. She has an engaging grin, a mischievous sense of fun, and a thin piping little voice. She also functions on the level of a 2 year old.

Toddler Girl cannot sit in a chair. She crawls all over it, crawls under the table, dances beside it, but does not sit. Toddler Girl interacts with the other children by pinching, poking, waving her hands in their faces, doing whatever she can to provoke them. She then giggles when they start to yell. Toddler Girl cannot write, trace, or recognize her name and still holds a crayon with a fist grip. She tries to eat the play dough, draws on the walls and posters, and pours sand on the floor. The other children are quickly turning on her. If they were a bunch of chickens they would all be gathered around pecking Toddler Girl to death right about now. It's almost impossible for me to drum up feelings of acceptance and support for her when she undermines me at every turn by snatching toys, scratching the others, or coloring on their papers and then laughing in delight when they start to shriek in fury.

Because Toddler Girl had absolutely no interactions with anyone associated with the school before walking into my classroom that early Monday morning, no one knew of her developmental delays. And her mother is completely in denial, telling us over and over that it's all because her older brothers and sisters do everything FOR her, that she will catch up now that she's away from them. I don't know how to tell Mom that she is wrong and Toddler Girl needs way more help than I can give her in a class of nearly 20 other kids.

Everyone at the school is in agreement, Toddler Girl is headed for the special ed program. But because Mom is fighting us, it is going to take a while. So I may be babysitting her for another month or so. In the meantime, I have to come up with a way to help the other children accept her for who she is and what she can do. I've been making a point of trying to spend some of each day's centers time playing with Toddler Girl. This serves a two-fold purpose. It allows me to model interactive play for her (right now, like any 2 year old, she mostly engages in parallel play). It also draws other children over, because fewer things are more tempting to the average K kid than a chance to play with the teacher. Once I get a little group playing around Toddler Girl I try to ease myself out of the picture and observe. Unfortunately, as soon as I depart the play tends to fall apart because Toddler Girl will snatch a toy from someone, knock down a tower they were building, or smash their play-dough creation and then giggle with delight at the reaction.

Our standard discipline plan at school involves a pocket of colored cards and a misbehaving child being told to move his/her card to the next color. Each color has a specific consequence, most of which involve missing varying amounts of recess or centers time. This is completely ineffective for Toddler Girl, as she cannot remember why she has flipped her cards and is now devastated to miss play time. In her eyes I am just being mean and making her sit when others play, there is absolutely no connection between "well, I pinched Sally during morning circle, so now I'm missing 5 mins of recess an hour later". I am probably going to have to suspend flipping cards with her and simply send her straight into time out for misbehavior.

Van Gogh finds Toddler Girl particularly irritating and I spend much of my day trying to keep the two as far apart as possible. She LOVES his over-the-top screaming reactions to her incessant teasing, poking, and bothering and is absolutely delighted if she can send him off his nut into a raging tantrum. I actually went so far on Thursday as to corner Van Gogh, a very bright boy, and say pointedly "You do not go into a center where Toddler Girl is. If she comes into the center where you are, you need to move. She loves making you scream and when you scream you get in trouble. STAY AWAY from Toddler Girl!" Horrible of me, I know, but if she keeps provoking him Van Gogh is going to wind up crossing the line and hurting her. So far his outbursts this year have been confined to screaming and crying fits, but I know from his preschool teacher that if he is pushed far enough he will erupt physically.

Needless to say, I have my hands completely full with this class. And there are so many other friends I haven't introduced yet!