Top 10 Lessons From Your Child’s Final Year of Nanny Care, Daycare or Preschool
1. Your Child Is Ready for Kindergarten; You Still Need a Gradual Transition
Your child marches confidently toward school carrying a backpack. You remain in the daycare parking lot clutching an emergency juice box and whispering, “But who will remind her that Wednesday is purple?”
2. Preschool Graduation Requires More Ceremony Than Most State Funerals
The graduates wear robes, receive diplomas and pose for 900 photographs after completing rigorous coursework in advanced sharing, applied finger painting and refusing to nap while insisting everyone else remain silent.
3. The Final Tuition Payment Produces a Dangerous Sensation Known as Hope
Parents briefly imagine depositing that money into savings. Then kindergarten supplies, after-school care and the annual fundraiser arrive together and explain that money never intended to stay with you.
4. Your Nanny Knows Your Child Better Than the Family Medical Records
She knows which cup prevents civilization from collapsing, how the banana must be sliced and why the green socks are acceptable on Monday but an act of emotional warfare on Thursday.
Her final handover binder contains 400 pages and one frightening sentence: “Good luck substituting the dinosaur plate.”
5. The Last Year Contains 247 Special Theme Days
There is Pajama Day, Pirate Day, Inside-Out Shirt Day, Community Helper Day and Bring 47 Cotton Balls Tomorrow Day.
The notice for each arrives at 9:43 p.m., immediately after every store selling cotton balls has closed.
6. Preschool Teaches Independence by Assigning Parents More Homework
The child learns to put on shoes. The parents must construct a scale model of the solar system, provide nut-free snacks for 28 children and decorate a family-history poster using photographs nobody has printed since 2014.
7. “They’ll Eat When They’re Hungry” Remains an Untested Scientific Theory
At daycare, your child eats quinoa, carrots and lentil stew.
At home, the same child examines a chicken nugget as though appearing before a congressional committee investigating suspicious meat geometry.
8. Your Child’s Best Friend Is Someone Whose Parents You Cannot Identify
You hear about Charlie every evening. Charlie is hilarious. Charlie can climb everything. Charlie apparently owns a dragon.
At pickup, you meet six Charlies, four exhausted fathers and one woman who says her child has been talking about yours for eight months. Nobody knows which family belongs to whom.
9. The Farewell Gift Can Never Adequately Thank Someone Who Helped Raise Your Child
You offer flowers, a gift card and a handwritten note. What you actually owe the caregiver is a vacation home, lifetime healthcare and compensation for listening to “Baby Shark” approximately 11,000 times without abandoning the profession.
10. The Child Leaves Daycare Without Looking Back; The Parents Require Tissues and Counseling
Your child says goodbye, hugs the teacher and asks what is for lunch.
You stand beside the cubbies sobbing over a forgotten mitten because it represents childhood, time and the $38,000 you apparently spent teaching someone to recognize the letter B.
The teacher gently escorts you outside. Another family needs the parking space.
Alan Nafzger was born in Lubbock, Texas, the son Swiss immigrants. He grew up on a dairy in Windthorst, north central Texas. He earned degrees from Midwestern State University (B.A. 1985) and Texas State University (M.A. 1987). University College Dublin (Ph.D. 1991). Dr. Nafzger has entertained and educated young people in Texas colleges for 37 years. Nafzger is best known for his dark novels and experimental screenwriting. His best know scripts to date are Lenin’s Body, produced in Russia by A-Media and Sea and Sky produced in The Philippines in the Tagalog language. In 1986, Nafzger wrote the iconic feminist western novel, Gina of Quitaque. He currently lives in Holloway, North London. Contact: [email protected]
