I Don’t Wanna Go to School!

courtesy of Manilla Blog

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Posted: 26 Aug 2011 08:51 AM PDT

Going back to school brings up a range of emotions and reactions for kids and their families. Some are perfectly healthy, while others may signal a serious problem.
School can be a wonderful experience for many individuals, but for some it can be a nightmare. Bullies can lurk behind every corner; there are germs there; what if I make a mistake??? All of these experiences can lead to something that is becoming more and more common in our schools today – School Anxiety / School Refusal (SASR). SASR is a serious problem that has exploded recently. When I was a kid, I knew of almost no one that refused to go to school -it was relatively unheard of until recently. But now I co-direct an intensive therapy program that is full all year long with high school aged adolescents who refuse to go to school for several different reasons:1.       When some kids go to school, they feel anxious sad, or depressed, so they want to avoid school so that they will not experience these feelings.
2.       Some children are afraid that they might make a mistake or be judged or evaluated while at school and this feels like too much of a risk to take, so they refuse to go so that they will not be judged or evaluated.
3.       Some families are so enmeshed that as a whole they cannot take the stress of separation from each other, or there are parents who cannot stand the idea that their child might be uncomfortable, so they allow their children to avoid going to school.
4.       Some kids stay home because it is frankly more fun at home than it is at school – they get to sleep in, play video games, and watch TV all day, and then they are usually allowed to go and hang out with their friends after school.
Obviously, there are serious concerns with not going to school, and many parents tell me that they will just home school their children until they are ready to go to college, and then everything will be fine. The problem is that once they go to college, it is not fine and then everything just collapses.
So, if your child had a serious medical illness, you would not wait for it to just go away on its own. In a similar way, why allow a psychological issue to be dealt with by just hoping that it will go away? SASR is serious and there is effective treatment for it. There are many great resources out there for it as well (see Kearney’s publications).
If your child is having problems with SASR, here are a few quick tips:
1.       Remove all electronics. Many kids only know how to entertain themselves with things that require electricity, so take the music players, cell phones, computers, lap tops, game systems, and anything else that is entertaining, and lock them away at your job. Also, for items too big to remove, buy plug locks to put on them to prevent them from being plugged in. Once all entertainment is taken away, school might start to seem more exciting than home.
2.       All children must be up by 7:45 and at the dining room table by 8:00. All they have available to them are their school books. No special lunches or extra attention from mom and dad are allowed. And, if they were “too sick” to go to school, then they get to do NOTHING else that day- no matter what.
3.       Life is an economy. Moms and Dads go to work or stay home to make things run smoothly. Kids have a few roles in this – A. Go to school, B. Do your homework, C. DO some chores. If you do not do these things, then you get no rewards, just like there are no paychecks if you do not do your work.
Try to follow these steps to see changes. Going back to school is an important transition, so make sure to treat it as such and do what you can to get your kids and your family ready for the new year.