How to Help Your Child Adjust to a New Daycare After Moving to a New City
I sat in the Target parking lot of our new Portland neighborhood last month, engine still running, listening to my 3-year-old Mia scream through the backseat door. Ten minutes earlier, I’d dropped her off for her first day at the new daycare, and I’d barely turned onto the main road before she started sobbing so hard the teacher had to carry her inside. I circled back, parked, and now she was gasping that she just wanted her old teacher Ms. Rosa’s sparkly playdough, and she didn’t belong here. The old daycare sticker was still peeling off her sippy cup in the cup holder, and I had to admit I felt pretty much the same way she did.
We’d moved 2,000 miles across the country for my husband’s new job, leaving the small suburban Chicago town we’d lived in since Mia was born. She’d been at her old daycare since she was 10 months old. She knew which bin the T-Rex toys went into, that Ms. Rosa saved her the purple nap mat every naptime, and exactly how to twist the water fountain handle to get the right stream of water. The new daycare was the only center with an opening for a 3-year-old that wasn’t a 45-minute drive from our rental. We toured it once, Mia colored a picture of a cat while we talked to the director, and she nodded when we asked if she wanted to come back. I bought into the common line that kids are resilient, so I didn’t overthink it.
The first week was worse than I expected. Every morning, she’d plant her feet at the car door and refuse to move. She wouldn’t eat snack or lunch at school, and she’d hold her bladder for 8 hours until we picked her up, sopping through her underwear in the car ride home. One night halfway through the first week, she woke up at 2 a.m. sobbing that she didn’t know where the bathroom was at the new school, and she didn’t know who to ask if she needed help. That’s when I called Ms. Lily, her new lead teacher, and asked what we were doing wrong.
Ms. Lily didn’t pat my back and say it would be fine, which I appreciated. She pointed out what I’d completely missed: every single routine Mia had relied on for two years was gone. At the old daycare, she didn’t have to think about hanging up her coat, or asking for a drink, or finding a spot on the rug for circle time. It was all automatic. Now every small step is a new, stressful decision, and that exhaustion comes out as crying or defiance. That made so much sense, I realized. I was so focused on getting her to like the new place that I forgot how much mental work it takes for a small kid to adjust to a whole new environment.
Ms. Lily’s first suggestion was so small I almost laughed, but it worked. She asked us to make a tiny photo book with just five photos of the new daycare: the hook where Mia hangs her backpack, her cubby, the bathroom stall she uses, the snack table she sits at, and the playground slide she’d liked on our tour. We printed the photos at the local Walgreens for 10 cents each, stuck them in a $1 4×6 photo album that fits in her cubby, and looked through it once every night before bed. She could take it out during the day if she felt lost, Ms. Lily said.
The second thing we added was a two-minute pre-dropoff walk-through every morning. Instead of rushing her in, kissing her cheek, and leaving, we’d walk slow: check the hook, hang up her backpack, wave at the class hamster, and tap the drawing she taped to her cubby. It only adds a couple minutes to our morning, and it lets Mia go through the first steps of the day with me right there, before I leave.
I also changed how I talked to her about daycare. I used to gush about how fun the new playground was, how many new friends she could make, and she’d just shut down and say she didn’t want new friends. Now I let her talk about Ms. Rosa and her old friend Lila as much as she wants. Two weeks in, we wrote a postcard to Ms. Rosa together: Mia drew a sparkly T-Rex on the front, and we wrote that we missed her. Ms. Rosa wrote back a week later, and we taped the postcard to our fridge. That simple act let Mia process her sadness instead of pushing it down, and she stopped shutting down when I brought up daycare.
I also swapped my standard question “did you have fun today?” for tiny, specific questions: “What snack did you eat today?” “Did you push anyone on the swing?” “What color crayon did you use for your picture?” Big questions feel overwhelming when everything is new, but small questions give her an easy opening to talk, without pressure. A week after we started that, she told me out of the blue that she shared her goldfish crackers with a boy named Jax who likes dinosaurs too.
It’s been six weeks now, and it’s not all perfect. Last Monday, she refused to put her shoes on, crying that she just wanted to go back to the old daycare. The old sticker is still on her sippy cup; I haven’t peeled it off. She still says the new playdough isn’t as soft as Ms. Rosa’s.
Last week, though, we were at the grocery store, and she spotted a box of sparkly playdough on the bottom shelf. She asked if we could buy a pack to bring to Ms. Lily, to keep at the new daycare. I said yes. We dropped it off that Friday, and Mia left it on the art table with her name written in crayon on the bag.
She still has her photo book in her cubby, though she doesn’t pull it out every day anymore. Some mornings we still do the walk-through, even when we’re running late. It’s still a work in progress. We didn’t fix all the sadness or all the uncertainty in a week, or even six weeks. But we gave her small, steady things to hold onto, when everything else felt new and strange. That’s enough, for now.
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