I just wanted to pose a scenario to you all and ask for your advice and opinions. I run an OSHC service, and we have in our care a child who has started school this year. After this particular child attended the kindergarten best start program (for which I volunteered to get to know some of the children and families) the school principal, the child's daycare service, the head teacher of the school as well as myself told this child's parents that he was not ready to start school this year (he is 5 in May). The child's parents did not want to hear it and enrolled him anyway.
Fast forward to this week and the child has started school as well as attending OSHC morning and afternoon, five days a week. This child spends most of his time running out of the door, unlocking the door to escape, kicking, hitting, throwing, punching and pushing. Yesterday he kicked over a bowl of food and when asked to pick it up he then ran back to squish the food into the floor with his foot, he then ran away and came back to do it again.
We had a meeting with this child's father and mentioned that we feel this child may need to see a pediatrician, get his hearing and eye sight checked, the response was to basically tell us that we were treating him wrong and that there is no problems with him. This parent then went on to explain that there are major problems at home and basically turned it around on his wife and told us that there was no way they would be looking into any diagnosis.
I guess basically my question is how would you educators handle a situation where the child clearly has issues but the family is unwilling to do ANYTHING about it and you feel that this child could be endangering other children, educators and even other parents.
Thank you so much for your help in advance
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