When children are unhappy at school and are reluctant to go in, this is often framed as ‘anxiety’. This means that the child’s emotions are assumed to be the problem, the thing which is stopping them from happily attending school. Mostly, adults will assume that they are anxious about something (school) which is not scary and so the work of parents and professionals is to change how they feel so that they can go back to school and everyone can relax. This is an approach which has serious drawbacks.
Because we have decided that the problem is their anxiety, the interventions offered are emotional ones. Interventions are offered which assume that if only the child stopped being anxious, there would no longer be a problem with school, and so the child has an anxiety disorder. Children are referred to health professionals (if they are lucky) who follow the protocols for treating anxiety disorders. They try hard to teach them anxiety management strategies and to challenge their beliefs about school. The treatment for anxiety is typically to do the thing you’re anxious about – so that means, if you’re anxious about school, you must go to school. If you’re anxious about hot coals, walk over the coals. Did it once and it hurt? Do it again.
Parents are told not to allow their child to avoid school, as (they are told) this will bring short term relief but in the long term will make things worse. They’re told to increase the ‘pull’ to school by being firm and making it clear that school is not optional. They’re told to increase the ‘push’ from home by not doing anything interesting with their children at home or sometimes even hardly interacting with them during school hours.
It all sounds fine on paper. A bit of gentle encouragement, some firm boundaries and perhaps a sticker chart, and all will be well again. Your child will skip happily into school. This difficult time will be over.
This advice works for some, but not for all. And for those for whom it doesn’t work, the advice is often to keep on doing the same thing. Keep on pushing. Keep making home boring, keep on presenting a united front with the school. Just keep going.
This causes untold damage.
Parents tell me that the ‘don’t let them avoid’ advice in practice means ‘force them to go in’. They tell me that children are peeled off them screaming and that the agony goes on for years. This is not how an anxiety intervention is meant to look. It is not therapeutic. Trust me on this one, I’m a therapist. We don’t treat anxiety by making a person face their anxiety against their will, time after time, when it’s abundantly clear that the anxiety is getting worse not better. Parents tell me that their whole family is in crisis, that their children wake every night begging not to go to school and that Sundays are shrouded with dread. They tell me that their children aren’t learning, not because they aren’t in school, but because every waking moment is spent highly anxious and aroused, worried about whether they will be forced to go in tomorrow. And that is not a good state to learn.
What’s missing is the recognition that school in its current form is not a place where every child can thrive. What’s missing is the understanding that there might be no ‘disorder’ here at all, that the child’s distress might be a reasonable reaction to circumstances. There’s no discussion of the shaming behavioural strategies, how anxiety is used to motivate or the way that children are actively prevented from playing in order to spend their time sitting at a desk. There’s no reference to the fact that many find the constant pressure and lack of privacy hard to manage. There’s no space to ask whether the developmental needs of this child are being met, or whether they feel cared for and valued. There is no recognition that school is set up so some children will fail, that the constant comparisons do not always work to motivate, because what some children learn is that they will never be good enough. This is inevitable, it’s how the system is designed. They cannot all be winners.
All of this is invisible when we decide the problem is an anxiety disorder. The focus on the child’s emotions as the forum for change lets the system off the hook. It stops us from asking questions about the constant flow of children whose unhappiness is so profound that it makes them ill. It stops us from asking difficult questions about whether our education system is fit for purpose. It stops us pushing back and asking for change.
Instead, we focus on the child who says No. We say that this is the problem, and they must instead say Yes. More than that, they must be made to see that Yes is the right answer, the only answer and that even just thinking of saying No was a very bad idea. One which, some of them are told, might put their parents in prison. Oddly, this doesn’t make them feel less anxious.
What could be different? Imagine if we didn’t think children who are unhappy at school were disordered. Imagine if we took their concerns seriously. We’d need to ask what they don’t like about school – and we’d really listen to the answers. We’d listen to the children who say they want to play for longer, they need to be with their Mums for longer, they want to be able to learn about the things which interest them. We’d to listen to those who lie awake at night worrying about their spelling tests and their attendance awards, and maybe we’d assess the impact of increased pressure and more tests by measures which weren’t just about educational outcomes. We’d need to change the education system so it didn’t cause children such distress, rather than trying to change the children to better fit in.
We’d to stop defining school as Always Right, because that means that some children start to think they are Always Wrong. We need to see their anxiety and distress as a consequence of the system, just as much as the GCSEs. It doesn’t have to be true for all in order to be true for some.
If we listened, we might start to ask ourselves questions. We might say, is it worth it, this process we put our children through? Is the gain so great that it’s worth the distress? If it’s not, are there ways we could change? Not just tweaks, but real, profound change. If we saw their unhappiness as a product of the system, as feedback on their experiences, then we’d have to direct our interventions there. We’d have to stop thinking that we can force children to learn, and instead focus on making schools fit for children.
Emotions are there for a reason. They alert us when something isn’t right in our environment. Anxiety is a warning signal. There’s nothing wrong with a person who doesn’t want to walk across hot coals and of course it would make you anxious if you were forced. One might even say that those who refuse are clear-sighted. They feel things that the others don’t. One thing is for sure, if we don’t listen carefully, we’ll never see what needs to change in the system. We’ll be teaching them relaxation exercises for ever because they won’t work. The anxiety isn’t the problem.
Thank you. This made me cry as it’s all so familiar and I’m still working on shedding the guilt and shame I feel at having listened to such bloody awful advice. We finally got clear and removed our child from mainstream school. They are now thriving in a supportive, compassionate, self-directed learning environment. Hope has been restored and the future no longer inspires fear and worry. The kid who had anxiety and over attachment has just now, aged 14, been diagnosed as having autism. In one way, this is something we kinda knew so it’s a relief to know now for sure and we can seek more appropriate support. In another, it makes the advice given from psychiatrists and psychologists in the past even more infuriating! Thank you for sharing these oh so important words and insights. The struggle with school can be such a lonely place for many and it really helps to know that no one is alone in this experience. 💖💖💖
What are we to do in the meantime while waiting for change? Traditional school is too much for my daughter now that she’s in middle school. Both parents work so how do we homeschool? I don’t making her go. We were forcing her until she started to run. I was done after that. It’s just not good for her to be in school in that mental state—fight or flight for the majority of the day.
This did male me cry . The system at school is causing my 12 year old and myself such distress. I'm telling staff my child feels like he is suffocating and feels trapped he is exhausted and the school tell me his " bad behaviour " is choice behaviour. We are at breaking point.
Feel this so deeply. We pressed for 1.5 yrs and my kid fell apart every morning and it took me a long time to trust that his distress/traumatic nervous system activation constantly, on repeat, was so not ok that it far outweighed the pressures to 'attend.' Cost too high. We are finding footing now. It is ok for our kids to feel ok instead of doing a harmful and poorly designed systemic thing!
For some students the bullying they are experiencing in school appears to be the reason for their unhappiness in school and seems out of their locus of control.
Thank you. This made me cry as it’s all so familiar and I’m still working on shedding the guilt and shame I feel at having listened to such bloody awful advice. We finally got clear and removed our child from mainstream school. They are now thriving in a supportive, compassionate, self-directed learning environment. Hope has been restored and the future no longer inspires fear and worry. The kid who had anxiety and over attachment has just now, aged 14, been diagnosed as having autism. In one way, this is something we kinda knew so it’s a relief to know now for sure and we can seek more appropriate support. In another, it makes the advice given from psychiatrists and psychologists in the past even more infuriating! Thank you for sharing these oh so important words and insights. The struggle with school can be such a lonely place for many and it really helps to know that no one is alone in this experience. 💖💖💖
So good. But how do we change the system? How do we convince those in power of this and bring about change?
What are we to do in the meantime while waiting for change? Traditional school is too much for my daughter now that she’s in middle school. Both parents work so how do we homeschool? I don’t making her go. We were forcing her until she started to run. I was done after that. It’s just not good for her to be in school in that mental state—fight or flight for the majority of the day.
This did male me cry . The system at school is causing my 12 year old and myself such distress. I'm telling staff my child feels like he is suffocating and feels trapped he is exhausted and the school tell me his " bad behaviour " is choice behaviour. We are at breaking point.
Feel this so deeply. We pressed for 1.5 yrs and my kid fell apart every morning and it took me a long time to trust that his distress/traumatic nervous system activation constantly, on repeat, was so not ok that it far outweighed the pressures to 'attend.' Cost too high. We are finding footing now. It is ok for our kids to feel ok instead of doing a harmful and poorly designed systemic thing!
Wildly accurate and refreshing. Thank you.
For some students the bullying they are experiencing in school appears to be the reason for their unhappiness in school and seems out of their locus of control.