10 March, 2010 - The sight of a child’s first day at a childcare centre conjures up the image of a boy described by Shakespeare in the second of the seven stages of a man in one of his plays, As You Like It.

“Then, the whining schoolboy, with his satchel and shining morning face, creeping like snail unwillingly to school.”

For the past week, a Bhutan Telecom employee, Kuenga, spent every evening trying to paint an exciting picture of a school to convince his three-year-old son, who this week attended his first day at a child care centre in Thimphu.

Kuenga and his wife were as elated as their son was upbeat about his first day at the Wangmo Montessori childcare centre at ChangJiji.

They started earlier than usual on March 1. While Kuenga spruced his son up, dressing him in his favourite clothes and creaming him up, his wife fixed their breakfast and lunch boxes.

They set out feeling excited and anxious at the same time.

On entering the gate, and at the sight of other little children playing on the lawn, Kuenga’s son got cranky and began clinging to him pleading to return home.

Like Kuenga, other new working parents lingered at other childcare centres around Thimphu, helping their children settle into the new ambience of their second home.

A government employee, who enrolled her three-year-old daughter at Pelki Losel, decided to spend a whole day at the centre, after her daughter began screaming and crying when she attempted to leave her at the centre. “I decided to take the day off from office just so I could help my daughter familiarise with the centre and its staff and other children,” she said, fearing she would have to request her boss for half-day leave for a week until her child settled into the new environment.

Another government official tried to soothe his two crying daughters by mounting them on a see-saw and pushing them on swings.

“This is my first and last time coming to drop them here at the centre,” he said. “I thought the toys and games they have here would lure my daughters into staying at the centre.”

While there were a few children, who mellowed into their new settings without causing their parents much worry, many had to keep their babysitters at the centres with their children.

Some children were comforted by the presence of their grandmothers, with their rosaries, to watch over them. Dema, 68, a grandmother of two, was overcome with a sense of d?jˆ vu. She had accompanied her son when she first enrolled him in Lungtenzampa school in the early ‘80s and she was reliving the experience today with her grandchildren.

Those days, she said, all parents had to do was take their children to a designated classroom and hand them over to their class teachers.

The class teacher would then pull the children by their hands into a crowded classroom and latch the door from inside, while the children cried their lungs out, gazing after their parents from the classroom windows. “Parents then enrolled their children only at the age of six or eight,” Dema said, adding that even at that age, children cried on their first day at school. “It’s only natural for children being sent to such centres at such a tender age.”

A newspaper employee, Penjor, recalled the experience of his first day at the age of eight in a boarding school in Punakha.

“While the day exposed the grim faces of children, sobs filled the dark halls of the hollow dormitory in the night,” Penjor said.

But, as days passed and school activities kept Penjor occupied, the once hollow dormitory turned into a hall full of friends, who engaged in frolic.

“We were loath to leave school during the breaks and looked forward to returning,” Penjor said.

In a similar way, Kuenga hopes that his son will also settle into his new environment. It has barely been a week and his three-year-old is beginning to develop a liking for the centre.