Chain saws and scared toddlers

You’d think N would be used to noisy mechanical equipment, having been used to tractors, diggers, quad bikes etc from a young age.  But we’ve discovered that chain saws are really not a happy thing for him.

His day nursery has a great forest school area that they play out in regularly, even more so during the hot weather as it’s obviously shady compared with their open playground areas.  But having a forest school means there are trees which need maintaining.

The benefit of having the nursery on a farm site, means the children get to experience lots of different activities going on on the land around them.  It seems N wasn’t too keen when the tree surgeons came to chop up a tree and create some big logs for the children to clamber on.

When I picked him up that evening, N’s key worker told me that he’d been quite scared of the chain saws, so much so that she’d had to take him to watch out of the treehouse classroom instead of staying outside with the others.  I didn’t think anything of it, but since then he’s struggled to go to sleep at bedtime.  Cue lots of ‘crying’ and shouting out ‘mummy, want cuddles’.  He’s not been climbing out which he can do, and after a cuddle is happy to be left in his room again, but then a minute later he’s calling out again.  For an hour!  The first night, he went to sleep as soon as his dad came back in from work and gave him a cuddle, but the second night even that didn’t work, and it took longer again.

The two mornings, I’ve had him shouting the same as soon as he wakes up as well, even though usually he’d lie quietly in his cot until someone comes in to him.  So it’s obviously been a bit traumatising.

Turns out that he’d watched his uncle using the chainsaw on the farm a while back and had been scared of it then as well (one of his older cousins had been the same when his age), so not good.  Here’s hoping he can forget it and get back to normal sleeping.  He can’t really want to lose 3 hours of sleep a night.

Nursery said they’d see how he was going normally to forest school today, and hopefully that’ll show him that it’s back to being a peaceful play area again.

What things have scared your children when they were younger?