Our five year old daughter has, over the past month or so, been experiencing increasingly strong separation anxiety and we're not sure how best to help her. She's in general a very observant, very smart, somewhat shy and home-oriented (quiet out in the world, loud at home) child, but in the last few weeks is clearly deeply stressed out, which is manifesting as a very strong attachment to her mother and an aversion to doing much OTHER THAN hanging on her mother.
As far as we can tell, this all started up over the Christmas break, when she was home from preschool for two weeks and both her parents were also home / on vacation, but we didn't really start putting all the pieces together until she returned to preschool. Over the break, she started having a lot of worry about loss, which initially manifested as wanting us to take photos of any remaining bits of her meals after she finished them "because she would miss them." She also generally has been highly resistant to interacting with anything she got for Christmas (at all; I don't think she's touched anything since Christmas morning). Over the break, we just kind of rolled with it, but it's accelerated since.
Returning to preschool after the break was hard. There was, unfortunately, a lot of flux at the time of her return (her primary teacher announced she was leaving for family reasons, there have been other teachers and friends out due to... the whole world right now, etc), which I'm sure contributed to things. She's generally been very vocal about "hating school" since the break, with tearful dropoffs and, as far as we can tell, a lot of resistance to participation while at school. She does have a long day at school - we both work full time, and so she's basically there from 8-5, but that's been the case most of her life. She's always been a bit of a slow adjuster to new circumstances, and we expected a bit of that on the return to school, but it's been way stronger than we've really seen before.
Over the last week or two in particular, we've been seeing her increasingly seeming stressed and overwhelmed at home. She wants to be on or near mama at all times; if she's not, she just wants to wait for her. Ordinary parts of our routines that would be done with me (her dad) are now mournful waits for mama to be back, and she's very resistant to doing anything that might distract from those feelings. When she is with mama, she's basically fine; when she's not, all she can think about is that she's not. She's also bringing up death a lot, both as questions ("what is being dead like?", "when will I die?") and concerns. We also started seeing a lot of difficulty making decisions and aversion to activities she's historically enjoyed (often described as "I want to do this, but I also don't" => not really wanting to read books, play games, watch movies, do much of anything other than play with mama).
We've generally been trying to keep to our normal routines, and making lots of time for cuddles and playtime with mama, while also maintaining some boundaries ("mama will be available after your bath, she's doing some chores downstairs, so let's get this done so you can snuggle!"). The boundaries are clearly hard on her (she chose last night to just sit in her empty bathtub for a good half hour until mama came upstairs), but being clung to 24x7 is also hard on mama, and it's hard for me that our together times are now all about missing mama, not about US being together and doing anything.
We're working on getting her to see a play therapist, and otherwise trying to just be supportive and understanding (although this mode is exhausting for everyone; for her who is clearly stressed out, for mama as the only source of comfort, and for dad as the one who is NOT a sufficient source of comfort and is constantly reminded of that while trying to do his part). What else can we do to both give her space to feel her (clearly really big!) feelings while also helping her to not fixate on them and be able to do other things? |
Video
Web
Image
Music
BlogU
