As if his obsession with Peter Pan was not substantial enough, Jack appears to have developed a genuine fear of getting old.

So great is this concern about age, the mere mention of growing up has been known to drive him to tears.

I don’t lay the blame solely at the door of Hook, however. I think one of the causes of this is Jack’s great grandma. She’s a lovely woman, I might add, so it’s nothing personal.
Like many small children though, Jack is a little wary of people he understands he needs to be familiar with, but look unlike anybody he’s ever seen before.A little bit about Jack’s Great Gran. She is 99 (turns 100 this year) and is very frail and wrinkly but has all of her faculties. Jack has only met her a handful of times too, and our most recent visit it think spooked him.

Not only was he a little wary of her during the visit, but afterwards had lots of questions about why she looked and behaved the way she did. Our answer was, obviously perhaps, that she was “just old”.

As we should have realised at the time, toddlers have very little concept of timescales. Jack can’t think in terms of months and years just yet. He struggles enough with days and weeks.

As far as he was concerned, it may be just a few “sleeps” before mum, dad, or even Jack himself start looking, moving and behaving like Great Gran.

While this is a little bit amusing from an adult perspective, it’s also a little upsetting, although it doesn’t appear as if Jack is dwelling on the whole thing too much (fingers crossed).

It has had implications too. For example, until very recently, Jack claimed he didn’t want to move up into reception but would rather “stay in nursery forever”. For him, moving up a class equated to ageing, although erroneously assumed staying in the same place would keep him the same age.

How do you explain the concept of growing up to a toddler anyway? Its proving quite a task for us…