The Dawdle: Lessons for Dad from the Walks to Daycare

We have had the good fortune of a great, supportive daycare for the last few years. A few days ago we found ourselves quizzing Gabriel on continents he learned and can add that his math is coming along too.  The care and attention he has received was a key factor prompting us to hold him back a year. One major advantage of that daycare, however, has been the location.  Daycare is a scant 500 metres away and apart from allowing me to pick him up and drop him off, it has meant walks to and from daycare to bookend our Mondays, Wednesday and Fridays.

At the start of the day, there is the hustle to determine if he wants to walk with me or get a drive with his mother and to get him out the door.  On the night before, it may actually be a strategic move on our part to ask, "Who's walking you to school?", instead of the more neutral, drive-with-Mom-is-a-possibility use of "taking." (As I write this, I wonder if there is the slightest component of a quiz or a call for an expected response in our question rather than allowing him to flex some independent decision-making.) Getting him fed, dressed and out the door ends with him wanting to sprint down our apartment hallway to start our day.

The walks are consistent. I am always in more of a rush to get going and ensure that I'm at the office in time for the start of my day.  At the end of the day, there is less urgency on my part but the speed of his walk is dictated by his mood and energy level at the end of the day.  There are days when he wants to play king of the mountain on each pile of snow.  On others, he pays homage to the same tree (stump now, actually) that got knocked down in a hailstorm in June 2015. Some days he is exhausted and inconsolable. We race each other or run holding hands for the sake of speed without the competition. I am unrestrained in my paranoia about the traffic that is around and striving to ensure that he is vigilant about the cars.  We examine the skies on the predawn walks to acknowledge the huge moon or the colour on the horizon that promises a beautiful day makes us heed the coming of night.  We pause to take in the towers of downtown.

My mood is a factor on those walks as well.  In reality, I am writing this post to work through and trade in my own rush to get home for the presence to take in that dawdle more appreciatively.  My desire to cover those 500 metres quickly can take the opportunity out of the walk because of my poor perception of time. We do race from time to time on the walk home so I ought to take it when it comes.

If he wants to take a different route and walk through a path of large boulders to test his balance, his will wins out, as it should. When I am in a rush, I wish I could pressure him to pick up the pace or take a more direct route, but ultimately this part of the day, unbound by the walls and fence of the daycare is a moment that is his own. Apart from the simple exercise of the walk, there is a measure of independence that he can exercise by stopping the way he does and dictating a change in route if one appeals to him. Ironically, despite the independence that we might associate with the car -- it is mere mobility that a car provides -- it may actually be during this walk that he can develop autonomy with each step he does or doesn't take.  Whether I am holding his hand or a few dozen metres away beckoning him to catch up or cautioning him to watch the car there is an independence that he can exercise with each (watched) step he takes.  The talks about the day become familiar as he talks about a friend he had a hard time with.  I try to tell him to ask how his friends are rather than distancing himself and wait for the time when he can tell me he did and that it worked.

It will be years before I know if these walks amount to anything resembling an independence or autonomy that car-bound kids lack. In reality it will be a theory tested by evidence that I select quite carefully. Next September, when he starts -- as he already puts it, "real school" -- the walk will actually be a little shorter and we will start to grapple with the question of when to let him walk entirely on his own.  I started that walk one my own right away.  It was a 200 metre walk (thank you Google Maps) and I only had one residential street to cross.  Gabriel's will be a little longer and cross a major thoroughfare where moving violations occur with regular, cacophonous frequency.  As I did in the 1970's, I am confident that Gabriel will, when we allow him, be able to navigate that route with the good sense that I did.  For now, though, we will dawdle.

Should He Stay or Should He Go

As a November baby, Gabriel's timing or age or development -- whichever of these terms best serves to define the question of when he ought to start school -- is fraught with more reflection and inner debate than if he were born in the first half of the year. We have, revisited the question many times and each time nodded to ourselves that the best course is to keep him back one more year rather than rush him along. It is not a decision we have come easily to. I may have come to it a little more easily and my unwillingness to sleep on the decision to enrol him in school in September may belie a stubborn streak that I am very reluctant to acknowledge otherwise.

Gabriel is a big kid for his age. That was the story from his arrival and when I compare his size to my own during childhood, he is seven months ahead of me in his height and weight. The first things that come to mind are the expectations that will be thrust upon him because of that size. His peers will look up to him and expect him to do some of their heavy lifting on the playground or in other venues of uneasy childhood detente. Teachers will over look the birthdate in the class register and erode him with expectations of superior development and performance to go along with the size of the child. Those things are obvious, and there is a part of me that acknowledges how old his mother and I are and would like to hold on to him a little longer and at the same time do all we can to ensure that he is as independent as possible when he finishes his public schooling and comes to that cross road.

Earlier this year, Nadine had asked the question of whether he ought to start in September 2016 rather than 2017 and we mulled it over one more time. Four years and 10 months is a bit of a lag behind everyone else and it would be better to have him over-prepared than under. There may be those questions of him being bored if he waited a year longer and there would be the fact that he would be that much bigger than his peers when he finally gets into the queue but I would feel better prepared to talk to him about the advantages and onuses of his size than rebuilding confidence on a regular basis as he tries to catch up.

Earlier this week, the conversation emerged again at his daycare. We had a parent-teacher meeting at the daycare where the teacher in his room indicated that he had a hard time focusing and staying still in class.  I've noticed this in his music class on Saturdays as well. Despite this challenge with attentiveness, however, his daycare teachers feels we ought to consider enrolling him for kindergarten with the rest of the kids currently in his daycare class. Comparisons were made to another boy in the class who have had same problem with attentiveness and another who is slightly younger than Gabriel, but surpasses him for focus and calm. The daycare teacher asserted that she would be able to settle him down within a few months to the point that he would start working on his penmanship a little more, but that remains some distance off. We have witnessed him calm and focused to play with Lego or construction trucks, but my experience of late has been that it has been a slightly more difficult to retain his attention for books at bedtime. He has always been a challenge to settle down for bed; from day one he has seemed to have felt that he would be missing something while he slept.

One question we did not ask during the interview was whether her timeframe was accurate if Gabriel was only in class three days a week. On his days off, he has had the opportunity to go to gymnastics and rock climbing classes. The other thing that is obvious is that he has a lot of energy to burn off. He does have plenty to burn off and I have often joked that our efforts to wear him out are actually just improving his endurance.

I am not sure how much Nadine has given second thoughts to enrolling him early, but one indicator is her comment that the daycare wants to fill his seat with someone else. Further to that it would be a challenge for them to have Gabriel in a group when he is with a group of peers that are that much younger than him. There is the threat that he would be bored during the coming year of daycare, and that it would be a challenge for the teachers there to keep him engaged when they would be, focusing their energies on the majority of the kids. It would be an opportunity for him to take on a role to further develop his social skills and still pursue the valuable task of getting him to focus a little better.

And with that jumble of confessions and contradictions, I have shared the dilemma of when to enrol the lad in school and disclosed enough background for an "expert" to diagnose him with something and reach for the prescription pad. We are not, however, looking for a diagnosis to over-label or to simplify, medicate and discard what is first and foremost "boyhood."  We'll keep modelling calm.  I'll see if my intermittent practice of kanji prompts him to sit and work on writing his alphabet.  I'll keep telling him to keep chugging hard and not to stop and cry when he sees someone he wants to catch up to or pass when he is running.  We will keep him on his path and at his pace.