Many children eagerly enter their first classroom excited and a little nervous. It is perfectly natural, after all, to feel jittery when confronting something so new as school. But some children come bearing more than a normal amount of trepidation; some, in fact, are deathly afraid of saying good bye to their mothers.
"I had a student who would scream, kick, and bite for the first hour of class everyday," says Lisa Frasure, a former teacher at Alexander Local School District in Athens County, Ohio. "He would hide under the table and I would have to take him into the bathroom, which was someplace he felt safe, and after a while he would begin to calm down. There was no question in this case that his anxiety was disrupting everyone's day."
These children may be experiencing separation anxiety, a condition that, in its worst form, can ultimately affect children's ability to adjust to the classroom and may inhibit their ability to learn.
