Our 4.5-year-old has been in daycare since three months, and at the same daycare for nearly four years. His behavior at daycare has generally been a little up and down, mostly good days with some bad days (as reported by his teachers). The usual toddler stuff; hitting, pushing, name calling (he was never much of a biter).
Lately, he's been in a class with 4 or 5 other rambunctious boys and we frequently hear of him (and them) getting into "trouble". My impression is this consists of a lot of roughhousing and play fighting that gets out of hand, some biting (seems to be all of them at one time or another). My understanding is at least one of the boys may have behavioral problems. The daycare doesn't do anything to discipline, no time outs for example.
So pretty much every day for the past month plus, whenever we pick up our son, we hear that he's had a bad day; i. e. hit his friends, wouldn't follow directions, running around at nap time. What are we supposed to do at home to address this? Usually, he has 'bad mornings' and does well at lunch and after nap. So by the time we get him, the bad behavior is ancient history. We haven't been asked to address it, seems like the reports are a mix of my wife or I asking, and them volunteering if it was a particularly bad day. I personally get the sense they expect us to do something because one of the teachers was asking us if we did timeouts at home.
We've talked to him about staying away from kids who get him trouble, we've talked to him about being kind, patient, and listening to his teachers, not hitting or kicking, etc. We've been talking to him about these things since he was two actually. We do timeouts at home which are pretty effective with him, one minute per year, one warning then timeout. At home his behavior is fine 95% of the time. He has a younger sister he gets along with well for the most part.
About the daycare, I will say they have (what seems to me) to be fairly high turn over. His most recent teacher was let go for not being able to manage his class. Now his class has a variety of teachers from day to day, the same four or five women. My expectation is that they manage this stuff, separate these boys if they can't get along. The last thing I want to do is be down on my kid in the evening for stuff that happens during the day. So how should we handle this at home?