When Your Kid Doesn't Want to Go to School
An eye-opening perspective on school refusal — and four strategies for handling it.
Happy October, everyone! I have a big book deadline today, so I’m re-sharing a post that was previously behind a paywall. School anxiety is often high around this time of year and I thought it might be helpful.
Also, if you have nonbinary or trans kids, please fill out my new parent survey — I want to hear from you about the issues you and and they face and how I can help.
A while back in one of my weekly threads, I asked subscribers what they have been struggling with. One parent lamented:
Last Friday my 7-year-old second grader flat out refused to go to school. I think it was a mix of anxiety, getting over a sinus infection, poor sleep the night before, and my husband leaving for work (he works out of town 3-4 days a week). Now I'm anxious every morning that it'll happen again. We've talked about it and he talked about it with his therapist, too, but if there's any suggestions or research on school refusal I'd love to hear about it!
This was one of several questions I got about school refusal, so I put it on my short list to address ASAP. For insight, I reached out to Christopher Kearney, who runs the University of Nevada, Las Vegas School Refusal and Anxiety Disorders Clinic, and Brian Chu, director of the Youth Anxiety and Depression Clinic at Rutgers University, who also specializes in school refusal.
I have to admit, I wasn’t sure how relevant this topic would be for me personally. My kids have never flat-out refused to go to school, although they have certainly wanted to stay home when they’ve felt tired or sick, and understandably so. But when I finished my interview with Dr. Chu, my mind was blown and I vowed to change certain things about how I engage with my kids.
First, an overview: Kids miss school for lots of reasons. They pull a Ferris Bueller and hang out with their friends. Their parents ask them to stay home to look after younger siblings. They have Covid or the flu. School suspends them for disciplinary or academic reasons. Many kids miss school due to anxiety or stress, and these are the kids I’m going to focus on today.
Sometimes, school refusal is straightforward. Kids will say things like “I don’t want to go to school today!” (Parents of kids who do this: Hang tight, I’ll talk about what to do about these proclamations in just a minute.) Other times, school refusal is more abstract and indirect. A kid may wake up complaining that they’re especially tired, have a sore throat, or have a stomachache. And although they are telling the truth, and they really are feeling those physical symptoms, the underlying cause in many cases may actually be anxiety or depression.
What parents do in these situations shapes what happens down the line. Often — and this is quite understandable in our post-Covid world — we say things that suggest to our kids that they shouldn’t have to attend school (or do other activities) when they feel bad. Our kid wakes up and says, My stomach hurts, and we say, Oh, are you not feeling up to going to school today? This response is well-intentioned, but, as Dr. Chu explained to me, it suggests to kids that they shouldn’t have to do things when they feel uncomfortable, and this then becomes a very slippery slope — and, ultimately, a self-reinforcing behavior.
If you think about it, we often lay the groundwork for avoidance behavior in the way we talk about our choices. We say things like, “‘Gosh, I would go to the gym right now, but I'm feeling kind of tired. And so I guess I won't go.’ Or ‘Gosh, we were invited out to go see our friends. But it's been so busy, I'm just really worn out, so I'm just going to stay home,’” said Dr. Chu.
When we frame our choices this way, we inadvertently communicate to our kids that feeling tired or bad or “just not feeling it” is a perfectly valid reason to stay home. And of course, in some cases, it is — but for kids prone to school anxiety, this idea can become a powerful driver of school (and other activity) avoidance — and then, avoidance begets more avoidance. As Dr. Chu explained:
When you decide to take negative feelings and use them as a reason to avoid, or to hole up, withdraw, or to simply shut down, it starts a really bad habit. Because it's very self-rewarding, right? If you stay home, you're going to feel better, because it always helps when you avoid the thing that's scary. But unfortunately, what you learn is that the quickest, most immediate way to stop feeling bad is to avoid, and that becomes a bad habit.
Of course, if your child has clear symptoms of a contagious illness — a fever, runny nose, cough, vomiting or diarrhea, and the symptoms are not attributable to anything else — then yes, absolutely, keep them home. The same goes for when your kid appears to be in so much misery that they couldn’t focus at school (more on that in a minute).
But, as a parent, I’ve found that sometimes, my kids’ complaints are vague and not all that acute: I’m really tired today, or I have a headache, or my throat hurts. In those situations, when kids’ complaints are somewhat minor and it’s not clear that they could sicken other kids, we should be careful about how we respond.
Again: I’m not trying to be an asshole here. Of course there are valid reasons to keep kids home. But many, many kids miss school due to underlying anxieties that manifest in physical ways, and we need to be aware of the possibility that our kids could be staying home when they could, actually, get through the school day just fine and be better off for it.
But, okay, this is all focused on what not to do. What should you do when your kid announces they aren’t feeling well or don’t want to go to school? What can you do to reduce the chance that your kid will demand to stay home? Here are four strategies Dr. Chu and Dr. Kearney recommended.
Have a morning routine that isn’t rushed, and don’t problem-solve until after school.
If you want to minimize the chance that your kid will refuse to go to school, be sure that they follow a predictable, structured morning routine, Dr. Kearney said. Ideally, your child should “get up at the same time, go through the same tasks in the morning, and have enough time to get to school so it's not rushed,” he explained.
The more detailed the schedule, the better. Rather than telling your kid Be ready for school by 7:25, break it down into a step-by-step process. “We teach parents to be more specific in their commands — ‘You need to eat your breakfast and finish by 6:45. You need to get dressed and be done by 7:10. And now you need to put your books in your book bag,’” Dr. Kearney explained. “It's better to give more commands that are specific than one broad general command.”
When I asked Dr. Kearney what mistakes he sees parents making when trying to get kids ready for school, he said that they don’t plan the mornings well enough and are stuck trying to deal with issues that arise in the moment. “They're trying to work through the problem in the morning by bribing, negotiating, criticizing, lecturing — none of that works,” he said. “You want to save the longer conversations for the evening. The morning should be a situation where everybody already knows in advance what's going to happen.”
What if, in the morning, your kid brings up school-related problems or reasons why they shouldn’t go? Onto the next strategy.
Empathize and encourage.
Dr. Chu recommended that parents respond to kids’ pleas and complaints by empathizing with them and encouraging them to get ready for school anyway. If your kid complains of a stomachache, you might say, I know it's really tough when when you wake up in the morning and your stomach hurts like that. Why don't we try to get down to breakfast and see how you're feeling then. Another script might be, I know that this is a rough day. I know how you feel when you're having a migraine. Let's see how far we get and take it one step at a time.
The goal here, Dr. Chu said, is not to empathize BUT encourage. Rather, it’s to empathize AND encourage. You’re not saying I hear that you’re feeling sick, and that sucks, BUT I want you to get dressed for school. You’re saying, I hear that you’re feeling sick, and that sucks, AND I want you to get dressed for school. It’s a subtle difference, but the second one more clearly communicates that feeling uncomfortable is not, necessarily, a reason to stay home and skip school.
I asked Dr. Chu: But what if your kid might be lying? What if he’s just pretending to be sick? He said that, thankfully, with this approach, we never need to know the answer to that question. It’s irrelevant. We can give our kids the benefit of the doubt and assume that they really do feel sick (often, kids who refuse to attend school really do), because whether or not they “truly” feel bad doesn’t affect the way we handle the situation. We can believe them, and they can still go to school. As Dr. Chu explained:
[Many parents] fear that their child is either lying to them or trying to manipulate them. That one word — manipulation — is one of the most common worries and accusations that parents make. And once they start thinking and saying out loud that their kids are manipulating them, it ends up creating a lot of barriers that are hard to overcome. That's where the “empathize and encourage” really helps — it avoids that problem. Because then you don't have to worry about what the kid actually feels. You can take them at their word and say, “Yes, you have pain, and you're going to go.”
Again, this doesn’t mean that if your kid is in extreme pain, you should send them to school. But where do we draw the line? With kids who frequently complain of aches and pains, Dr. Chu suggests that families develop what he calls a “feeling thermometer,” where kids rate their pain or discomfort along a concrete scale that has individualized anchors. With a feeling thermometer, “there's a common language between the parents and the kids, so that they at least have a sense about what that day feels like,” Dr. Chu explained. Perhaps you decide that anything above an “8” means that your kid stays home.
(Side note: If your child is being victimized or bullied at school, and that’s why they don’t want to go, that’s a tricky situation. I don’t have the space to address it here — I will in a future newsletter — but you should definitely contact the school and come up with a safety plan, among other things.)
Say goodbye quickly, consider that your kid may enjoy school once they’re settled, and communicate with the school.
Saying goodbye to kids at school drop-off can be tricky, especially with preschoolers. Dr. Kearney said that it’s generally better to reserve long goodbyes (and give hugs, etc) at home, and then to only say a quick goodbye at school. You also don’t want to linger — the idea is to say goodbye and then leave, even if your child is upset.
Also, he said, recognize that lots of kids will have difficulty at drop-off and then be perfectly fine ten minutes later. If your child is having trouble with goodbyes, check in with their teacher or a school counselor to find out how they do once you’re gone.
In fact, no matter what, if your child feels anxious about school — or is often asking to skip school— it’s crucial to be in regular touch with their teacher or a school counselor, Dr. Kearney said. The counselor may be able to help with anxiety management and also provide accommodations, for instance by having your child come in part-time for a bit, and the shift to full-time when they’re ready.
If your child is missing a lot of school or their school anxiety is interfering with their daily life in a significant way, consider finding a local therapist, too.
Consider rewards if needed.
Those of you who’ve read my book know that I have a complicated relationship with rewards. Research suggests that when we reward kids for activities they don’t mind doing, we unwittingly undermine their intrinsic motivation to do them. However, rewards can a be helpful way to encourage kids to do things they really don’t want to do. If your kid is refusing to go to school, and empathizing and encouraging isn’t working, rewards may help.
If you use rewards, set up your reward system carefully. Dr. Chu recommended what he calls a “daily renewable reward,” and he said it’s crucial to set it up so that it rewards your child incrementally, but never punishes. An example: If your kid comes down dressed and ready for breakfast by 7:30, he gets an hour of screen time after school. If he struggles and barely gets down by 8, he gets 45 minutes. If he ends up late to school, he only gets 30 minutes. And so on. He’s almost always getting a reward, but the reward is larger the better he does. If he doesn’t go to school at all, he doesn’t get screen time that day, but the slate is cleared the next day and he once again is eligible for an hour of screen time if he gets downstairs by 7:30am.
What you don’t want to do is to fall into the trap of punishing rather than rewarding — a situation that could arise if, say, you promise a certain amount of screen time to your kid if they get to breakfast at 7:30, and then if they miss it, they don’t get screen time at all — and then you tell them that if they don’t get downstairs by 8, they’ve lost screen time for tomorrow, too. The idea, Dr. Chu said, is that “there's always a chance for the child to succeed at some point.”
This has been a lengthy post, so thanks for sticking with me if you’ve made it this far. To summarize: When it comes to ensuring that our kids go to school and learn to be resilient in the face of challenges, we need to be thoughtful about how we frame why we do the things we do. If we only went to the gym when we felt awesome and excited to go, we probably wouldn’t end up working out very often. And yet, when we suck it up and go anyway, we’re often grateful we did. Sometimes, “you have to actually act first and then feel second,” Dr. Chu said, but “that is so counter to the current emotional culture, which is that you do once you feel like you can do.” We can do a lot of things even when we don’t think we want to, and, in many cases, we are better off for having done them.
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I wasn’t able to label the anxiety I was feeling as a kid and teenager but looking back I still went to school while feeling that anxiety- I wish I had talked to a school counselor about it but it never occurred to me because I was always doing great academically and I assumed everyone had stomach aches all the time.
My own kids gripe about going to school occasionally but seem to always have a good day once they’re there. I feel the same way about most outings with my friends that feel hard to attend or networking events with the local bar or even zoom events where my camera has to be on. It’s so much easier to stay home and avoid discomfort, but I am trying to model pushing past my own discomfort for my kids. I know I will have a good time once I’m there!
For what it’s worth, after a really rough rough start to the school year for our anxious kid, we worked with the school and the superintendent agreed to a graduated schedule—half days to three-quarter days to almost full days to full days—for the first quarter. Our kid has a 504 for anxiety; we were extremely proactive and communicative with the guidance staff and teachers; and we helped our kid keep up with 99% of the school work. And it’s a relatively small district. All that allowed for the flexibility, which helped our kid move through the anxiety a lot. (Although it’s not a thing that fully tidies up and goes away, so onto the next as the kid learns and grows!)