Lawrence Hall of Science in Berkeley, CA

Received Wednesday, July 22, 2009
Your atrociously behaved daughter Lulu, in the Kindergarten Corner, Weds. 7/22 between 3:45-4:15 pm. was terrorizing her poor little brother (Peter?) for about half an hour that I saw, and your patient but overly mild nanny could not effectively make her stop. Every single time the little boy was playing on his own with something, your daughter would drop what she was doing, come running out of the blue, from across the Kindergartener's area, 30 feet away, and pry it out of his hands or wrestle it away from him and he would cry. He was about 2, not verbal yet, and she was likely 4 to 5, plenty old enough to know better. Twice, she was laying down inside the pyramid mirror thing in the Kindergarten area, and he came over wanting to join her inside it. Once, she shoved his face away and shoved his whole body away, then jumped up, grabbed him by his head and bit his head so that he cried. The second time it happened, she literally kicked him out, flailing her feet around in the air as she lay on the ground, kicking at his head until he gave up trying to come in. At least twice, the boy was playing in the enclosed areas with the huge padded "blocks" (squishy letters as big as a small child) and she yanked them away and dived on top of them so she and they landed right on top of him, squashing him until he cried. This is an injury waiting to happen.

Many times (too many IMO), your nanny came over and intervened, telling the girl they were leaving because she was behaving badly, but they never did. Each time the nanny approached, the girl would not stop what she was doing right away, but duck away from the nanny and run away, smirking and taunting, confident in the knowledge that nothing would happen and she could beat up on her brother with no consequences. At one point, the nanny seemed pretty serious about leaving and the girl was swinging at the nanny and hitting, or trying to hit her, yet they STILL did not leave due to her bad behavior.

Maybe the nanny is new in the job and hasn't yet figured out how to handle the girl, or maybe the nanny is just inexperienced in general, or needs more leeway from the parents in enforcing discipline, but at the second instance of this girl's bullying her poor brother, I would have made her sit quietly next to me for a 5 minute time out, at least, and if it had happened again, I would have left. I very nearly intervened at one point, when the brother was moving a small child's chair somewhere on his own, by the puppet theater, and she ran up and yanked it away from him, shoving him aside, when there were many other chairs she could play with if she wanted, and he cried and looked pleadingly at me for help as his nanny was out of his sight and his much bigger sister did everything she could to make him miserable. The nanny, when she was not timidly admonishing the girl, was busy texting on her cell phone. If this is your daughter, she needs to have some major limits set and enforced. She was absolutely dreadful, and I can only surmise that either you and your spouse are separating and she is undergoing major issues in her life, or that you have so far failed to provide much in the way of effective parenting, she was so awful.

She was Caucasian with medium brown longish hair, 4-5 years old, and her brother was also Caucasian with light brown hair, about 22 months -2 1/2 years. The nanny was young, probably under 25, and Asian.