Seahorse Nursery Wimbledon Park Day Nursery

I cannot recommend this nursery. My 22 month old daughter was asked to leave the nursery after several biting incidents. Despite our efforts to find a solution to the biting, including finding a private behavioural therapist and reaching out to various psychologists to come and observe in the setting, we were given less than 7 days notice to leave. At the time, I was heavily pregnant, working full time, and without family nearby and had to scramble to find alternative childcare. The head alleged they had never experienced biting like this in some 20 years of running a nursery (which sounds incredible). Beyond contacting the Merton council to request that a support officer come and observe my daughter (the officer was supposed to attend 3 sessions, but only managed 1 before we were asked to leave, and before we could properly implement any of the suggestions made by the officer) the nursery showed little interest in working with us to find a solution to what is clearly a normal developmental behaviour (per below) especially a not even 2 year old child. At the time I had reached out to a child psychologist for advice on biting and was given the following advise which I passed onto the nursery: Quote Hello again, I've just found this link which would be helpful to share with the nursery. As we discussed on the phone, biting is actually very common at this age. When this persists past the age of 3-4 that's when it is usually considered a problem. Of course, it's not a behaviour you want to continue but in order to help her stop biting, the nursery will need to do more to find out the possible causes and maintaining factors, and to then put different ideas into place to reduce it. Whether this is boredom, tiredness, emotionally driven, a way of asserting herself, a way to get attention (I would be curious about how much attention she gets when she's not biting), a way of showing affection, or her way of trying to engage in play. Whatever the cause (and there may be many different ones), it is really important to avoid using negative or shaming language when this happens. Her ability to understand and empathize with others perspectives will be very limited because of her age. Children learn to develop empathy through repeated experiences of this being modelled by adults. It would be good to remind the nursery that she isn't doing things with bad intent but more likely because of other causal factors, or she may enjoy the effect sensorily, in terms of how it feels or because a shocking reaction can be pleasing to a bored child. Also most children her age have no idea that biting hurts, and need time to learn this from adults who explain this clearly and calmly. Unquote
Jan 9th, 2023

Nov 6th, 2022

Nov 5th, 2022

Jan 23rd, 2022

Jul 22nd, 2021