When My 5-Year-Old Is Struggling: What I’ve Learned As A Worried, Sad Mom
I leaned against the preschool doorframe last Tuesday, 10 minutes early for pickup, and watched my daughter Lila through the glass. Circle time was wrapping up, and all the other kids were on their knees, swaying and singing the goodbye song at the top of their lungs. Lila was picking at a scab on her knee, leaning back against the bookshelf so far she was almost horizontal. When the teacher called her name to come get her name tag, she flinched like she’d been burned and shook her head. When she saw me, she bolted out the door and buried her face in my rain jacket, so quiet I could barely feel her breathing.
On the walk to the car, I asked her what was wrong. She didn’t answer until we pulled into the driveway at home, and I’d set out her favorite cheddar Goldfish and a juice box on the kitchen table. “I’m bad at everything,” she mumbled, picking at a cracker crumb. “Mia can tie her shoes all by herself. I can’t even cut a straight circle for art. The other kids finished their butterflies yesterday and I still only have one wing cut out.”
I sat there across from her, and that familiar sadness settled in my chest. I’d been brushing it off for months, telling myself she was just the youngest in her class, that she’s always been slow to warm up to new things. But that night, after I put her to bed, I scrolled through my phone for 20 minutes and saw three different reels of 4-year-olds reading chapter books and riding bikes without training wheels, and I cried a little into my pillow. It’s not that I wanted Lila to be a prodigy. It’s that I could see how hard she was trying, and how often she came up short, and it hurt to watch.
I made an appointment to talk with her teacher Ms. Rosa a few days later, and she said something that shifted how I see everything. She pulled out Lila’s art folder and flipped through half a dozen lopsided circles and crumpled butterfly wings. “Look at how many she tried,” Ms. Rosa said. “Most kids cut one bad circle and crumple it up and go play with blocks. Lila sits here and tries again seven, eight times. She can focus on a problem longer than any other kid in this class. You’re so focused on what she can’t do yet that you’re missing what she can do already.”
That conversation got me changing small things, one at a time, nothing fancy. First, I swapped the question I ask her every day after school. I used to ask “did you have fun?” which always got a shrug, or “what did you learn?” which she never knew how to answer. Now I ask “what was the hardest thing you worked on today?” It sounds small, but it shifts the whole conversation. Last week she told me she practiced cutting circles for 10 minutes and only got one that was almost round. Instead of saying “that’s okay, you’re still little” which just makes her feel like her struggle doesn’t matter, I said “10 minutes? That’s such a long time to keep trying. Can you show me that almost round circle?” She lit up and ran to get her backpack to show me.
I also started what we call “bad practice nights” once a week. We pick one thing she’s been frustrated about, get out snacks, and the only rule is that no one has to get anything right. If we’re practicing tying shoes, we just practice making the loops, and if the knots come out lumpy we laugh about how they look like little snakes and eat a chocolate chip. If we’re practicing cutting, we just cut up old construction paper into any shape we want, no requirements. Before I started this, I’d push her to keep trying until she got it right, which left both of us frustrated. Now there’s no pressure, and she’s actually getting better without noticing it.
Another small change: I stopped jumping in to do things for her when she gets frustrated. I used to feel so bad watching her struggle to open a juice box or zip her coat that I’d just take over and do it for her. Now I use one specific prompt instead, and wait. If she’s struggling with the juice box, I say “try pinching the little corner harder with your thumb first.” If she still can’t do it after two tries, I help, but most of the time she gets it on her own. It’s slower, and some mornings we’re late to preschool because of it, but it’s worth it.
Our pediatrician did confirm that Lila’s fine motor skills are a little behind where most 5-year-olds fall, nothing alarming, just enough that small physical tasks take more effort for her than they do for her peers. I used to see that as a big problem I had to fix fast, before she started kindergarten in the fall. Now I see it as just how Lila is built: she takes more time with small, hard things, but she sticks with them when most other kids walk away.
This week, Lila brought home a lopsided paper heart she cut out for my birthday. She carried it in her backpack all day, and she kept touching it to make sure it didn’t crumple. It’s not straight, the points are lumpy, and it’s way bigger on one side than the other. It’s taped to my fridge right now.
She still can’t tie her shoes. Some days she still comes home crying because she feels like she’s worse than everyone else. Some nights I still lay awake worrying if we’re doing enough, if the small changes matter, if she’ll always feel like she’s playing catch-up. The sadness doesn’t go away completely, not yet. But now it’s mixed with something else: I see how hard she tries, and that’s enough for right now. We’re not rushing to fix anything. We’re just going slow, one almost-round circle at a time.
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