Families: Parting with Less Sorrow

Her first day of kindergarten was so awful that 40 years later, Stephanie Johnson remembers every miserable detail. Raised by a stay-at-home mother, she had never spent much time with kids her age before. Arriving at school late, she endured the cold, silent stares of 30 other children as the teacher found her a seat. When her mother abruptly vanished, she felt abandoned, and her sniffling escalated into wails. "I felt like a garbage can deposited at the curb on trash day," she recalls.

She was determined that her son Jeremy would fare better. So the year before he was to start kindergarten, she overcame her lifelong shyness and began to canvass her California neighborhood, introducing herself to kids and their parents and setting up play dates with Jeremy's future classmates. In late summer, knowing that teachers often fix up their classrooms in the weeks before school starts, she dropped by the school so she and her son could meet his teacher, who invited them to look around the room. "I think we succeeded," Johnson says. "Jeremy is a happy, social child who, I am happy to say, occasionally gets into trouble for talking in class."

At some time in their life, all children experience distress--commonly called separation anxiety--when saying goodbye to parents. But as Stephanie Johnson can attest, the suffering can be kept to a minimum--which is important, since the way early separations are handled, psychologists believe, can influence how people manage transitions throughout their life.

Many parents who helped their children master separation in day care are caught by surprise when it erupts again in preschool or kindergarten--or even later. "Separation is not an event. It's a process," says Mary Ucci, director of the Child Study Center at Wellesley College in Wellesley, Mass. "It doesn't happen once. It happens continually over a lifetime." In fact, adults starting a new job are prey to the same prickles of panic that children experience on their first day of the school year.

Far from being aberrant, clinging to parents is instinctual, adaptive behavior. "Human children are very fragile and vulnerable compared with animals that can move independently from their parents at birth. They really depend for survival on their parents or some other connected adult," says Ucci.

PLAY GAMES For young children, games such as peekaboo and hide-and-seek reinforce the concept that people continue to exist even when they are no longer visible.

PRACTICE SEPARATING "Having successful experiences, in the sense of getting through it O.K., even with tears, is really the only way to get used to separating," says George Burns, principal of Fieldston Lower School in New York City. Make play dates with kids in your child's class. Visit the classroom ahead of time to familiarize your child with new surroundings.