If a child relatively new to the nursery shows troubled behaviour, think again about the process of settling in. Penny Tassoni offers some practical tips.

There is a little boy in our setting who is showing a lot of attention-seeking behaviour and tantrums. He is just two years old and has been with us for four weeks. We have followed our usual settling-in procedures, but he still screams every morning when his mother drops him off. He normally quietens after a while, but the minute another adult comes into the room he starts up again. We have tried praising him when he is showing wanted behaviour, but it does not seem to make any difference. Any thoughts?

I am afraid that this is not a simple case of attention seeking and so this is why you are not making any headway by using reward strategies. What you are seeing are behaviours linked to the child being separated from his parents in something known as separation anxiety. The answer is to deal with it very differently.

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