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When the language barrier makes your child unpopularPosted on Thursday 5 November 2009 at 03:01 - 1 Comments - LinkCatalonia is a wonderful place to bring up children, especially where I live. It’s a smallish rural village, situated near to the River Ebro delta and it's wonderful natural park consisting of many, many square kilometres of protected land and wildlife. It is also just 5 minutes drive from a lovely pretty fishing port & quiet (except July & August) coastal resort. Throw in the fact that the Catalans like most Mediterraneans are very family friendly and adore children, especially small ones. Perfect. One small problem – the local children!Joseph started at the village school in September aged just 3 years and 1 month, having spent the previous year in the village nursery. This is generally something that is taken as read over here, your child goes to nursery pretty much as soon as they can walk, regardless of whether you work or not, and to be fair at only €90 a month for full days (lunchtimes are extra) it’s an extremely affordable childcare arrangement. In fact only a couple of children in Joseph’s school year didn’t go to the nursery. I didn’t work at the time but felt that given the young age that they have to start school it would make sense to enrol Joseph in nursery. He was generally quite shy amongst other children, which I reasoned was a mixture of the language barrier and the fact that he hadn’t had much contact with other kids. Our families are in England and the only friends that we had with children had twin 5 year old boys who found Joseph an annoying toddler who threatened to break their toys, as you would expect. Also there aren’t the mother & toddler groups, rhyme time, baby signing etc classes that you get in the UK, probably because all the children are in nursery. Sending Joseph off to nursery would hopefully we thought, get him submerged into the culture and language and help him be more sociable towards his peers. I couldn’t bring myself to enrol him at 1 and as they only do one intake a year in the September I had to bite the bullet and start him at 2. I wonder now if that was a mistake and that maybe I should have started him earlier? For the first 6 months or so he only went in the morning, it didn’t sit right with my Englishness to keep him away from home for such long hours when I wasn’t even working, the morning session is from between 8.30 - 10.00 to 12.30 - 1.00 and then the afternoon session from 3.00 till 6.00. After 6 months though it seemed that he wasn’t really improving in his language or his social skills, so we decided to take him back for the afternoon session as well. There still wasn’t any major improvement in his speech or to my mind, his interaction with the other children when he left nursery in July so I was worried about him starting school. However, about a couple of weeks ago he really started to come out of his shell. Suddenly he could tell me all of the names of his classmates and would point them out to me excitedly. I noticed that it seemed to be the done thing to take your children to the local playground after school, at first it seemed a bit much to me, 5 hours of school and then the playground? Anyway I thought I’d go and check it out and to my surprise Joseph loved it (it also had the added bonus of completely knackering him out so a good night’s sleep usually followed). I loved watching his little face light up when he saw that Quim or Raul or Miguel were there and he’d race off to play some game of chase with them, squealing with laughter and having a thoroughly good time. Occasionally there would be a push or a shove or a kick etc, as 3 year olds do, but I started to notice a pattern. The chase games, weren’t chase games at all they were just the kids running away from Joseph. The kicks and pushes and hits were being done only to him and by pretty much all of his classmates with absolutely no provocation, sometimes just the mere sight of him would be enough for them to bully him. Other mothers duly brought their offspring up to apologise to him went they were caught in the act but it was happening too often. Tonight really brought it home to me when Joan, usually one of the nicer kids and one of the few who try to play with Joseph started screaming at him every time he went near him. Joseph not really understanding just thought it was a game and kept running off laughing, even when the boy tried to pull him off the slide steps he still thought it was Joan playing. It broke my heart! I tried to take him home a few times worrying how far it would go but Joseph kept protesting ‘ want to play with Joan’. What is my beautiful boy doing wrong? All he wants to do is play with them, he’s not violent in fact he’s very placid with them, taking all their bullying on the chin. When I told Al he said ‘Well, he’s strange to them isn’t he? He’s saying stuff they don’t understand.’ He added ‘don’t worry so much, he’s happy, he likes school, he wants to go to the playground, things will get better when he starts to speak more Catalan’. Well I agree to a certain extent but worry that he’ll start to realise that they don’t want to be friends with him and that will really knock his confidence, by the time his Catalan has improved the divide between them all will be much wider and it will be even harder for him to forge some friendships. Can’t believe am I worrying myself sick about bullying at 3. It pains me that my happy, friendly little boy is so unpopular. I know that they are only 3 and there is probably no deep malice in their actions but it is very clear to see that they don't like him. Read the rest of my blog here |
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