First Day of School

Today is the first day of school for Bo. He has been looking forward to it all summer. Last night, YehYeh sat him down at the kitchen table and gave him some pointers. "No hitting, no pushing, no teasing, be respectful, and you'll do fine", I heard her said. She gave him a hug afterwards as an encouragement. YehYeh is a bluebird (the second year) at preschool this year. She talks about kindergarten next year the way high school seniors talk about college. We haven't discussed the educational opportunities post kindergarten yet. Nevertheless, she is a natural student. She is sociable, inquisitive, competitive, and a born leader who is not easily fazed by peer pressure, or intimidated by authority. She figures out the rules for success and eagerly follows them to her own advantage.

BoBo, on the other hand, has issues (sigh). A supremely sensitive little guy with an emotional intensity beyond what his tender years can handle, he takes everything personally, and can not tolerate being misunderstood. More than the average toddler, he feels an absolute need to control his environment and is frequently frustrated and angry because of the impossibility of it all. Needless to say, preschool with all it's rules and relatively impersonal routine is very stressful for him. In his mind, it's not only an intimidating environment where his voice is drowned by many others, but also a place where right and wrong is frequently relative (to him), and arbitrary.

I am very glad that he will have two years of preschool before kindergarten. In order to succeed in formal education, he needs to learn that being unique is a state of mind, that it's not necessary or even that important to be understood, and that rules are not only not personal, they are created based on the lowest common denominator. Preschool, the toddler's little microcosm of the real world, is all about getting along, and only incidentally about right and wrong.

BoBo is only three, and I am already wanting to tell him to stop being so idealistic :-). Next year, Baby will get an entirely different message from me on his first day of school...something along the line of "the end does not justify the means".