Kiddipedia

Kiddipedia

(School Refusal, School Can’t, School Reluctance).

On the surface school attendance woes may seem like a concept that is based on a child that is worried about attending school on some level. After working with teens for the last 20 years in health and wellbeing in various settings, and through Raising Great Teens, I have found that in reality, it is a complex subject that can have huge implications for the child and their family. 

So why is it so complex? Well firstly let’s start with the notion of school attendance woes. It is commonly referred to as school refusal, a phase that many schools and professionals use but one that leaves families feeling it lays blame on their child and them. It puts the focus on behaviour rather than the cause and the deeper issues occurring for their child. This leads to a lot of shame and judgement from others, including those who are supposed to help, leaving families struggling, feeling alone and unsupported. 

As a result, many parents who are already in this community with other families on this journey and to be fair some professionals who are working in this area, are using the phrase school can’t. Turning the tide on the labelling of a child’s actions to rather drawing the attention to the fact that

it is not the child’s choice, they would go to school if they could, but they can’t.

School attendance woes, no matter what you label it, has the same meaning: a child is finding it distressing to engage in schooling, in attendance and in learning, whether that’s at an education setting or homeschool and unlike truancy the parent knows that their child is not attending school and are at home. 

There are numerous reasons why, but what every reason has in common is that underlying there is a stress response occurring, and it is the stress response that is dictating the behaviour that is seen.

What may cause a stress response? 

Several factors can cause your child to go into a stress response, here are just a few examples:

Adolescence can be an intense time of growth and before emotional and personal development growth, there’s usually a lot of mess and discomfort and fear and worry and in some cases when there is an intense overwhelm, fear, or worry around school, it can develop into school attendance woes. 

Learning style is not supported in the classroom, leaving a child unable to learn and as you can imagine, if you’re unable to learn the information in the way it is being delivered simply because your brain doesn’t learn that way, it will feel stressful. The most consistent evidence provided to the senate committee into school refusal Australia 2023, indicates that school refusal is most prevalent among students with disability (particularly neurodivergent students) and those with mental health challenges. 

Environmental factors that send your nervous system into overdrive. This can include everything from the clothes that they are wearing, causing distraction or irritation for their body that stop them from being able to concentrate, or it may be the lighting, or the noise levels.  Can you imagine if I wrapped you in an itchy blanket, turned the noise up and made the lights so much brighter how this would stop you from being able to learn. For some children with sensory overwhelm, this is just one way in which the uniform, the classroom or the yard may impact them. 

Mental health, whether that’s generalised anxiety which can present in several ways for example perfectionism, if it’s not perfect they feel an immense sense of failure and fear. Or Separation anxiety, were they feel such fear and distress when not with their main carer because something may happen to either one of them. Anxiety can be a crippling mental health illness and can impact attendance and engagement in school and learning. 

Social factors, everything from their relationships with the teachers, school staff, peers in the class and all other school students, to bullying and not feeling connected or included in school. Think about a time you felt unsafe at school or didn’t gel with the teacher and then add in the sense of not being able to escape it or change it. 

But while the reasons can be extensive, multiple, actual, or perceived. They all send the body into a nervous system response and it’s this nervous system response that is leading your child to beg you not to send them, or stopping them from being able to go entirely. When they do attend, they may be so distressed it inhibits them from learning when at school and while they look fine on the outside, it takes so much work to hold themselves together during the school hours that the minute they walk in from school they explode, they withdraw or are so mentally depleted that they just cannot function as their usual self.  

So, what is happening in a nervous system response? 

One of the main functions of the brain is to keep us alive and keep us safe. As part of keeping us safe we have the stress response, fight, flight, freeze, fawn is something that you might have already heard. This is a chemical reaction in your body enabling you to fight the danger, run away from it, be so still that you are not seen, or become incapable of staying tuned in to your environment n order to protect you. 

It is an unconscious chemical reaction to an environmental factor or a thought, it can be actual or perceived and it happens so quickly that it is impossible to stop it.

During the stress response the blood is redirected from the stomach and the intestines, leaving you with butterflies, feeling nauseous, or even vomiting and diarrhoea.  It is redirected into the muscles of the arms and legs so that if you run away or fight the muscles have got lots of oxygen, resulting in feeling hot, flushed, sweaty. The heart rate increases to get the blood where it needs to go quickly, resulting in a pounding fast heart. The brain goes into overdrive with lots of racing thoughts, all the different options that you have and all the worst-case scenarios that you could possibly have, everything that could happen in the future and remembering everything from the past. Along with all these thoughts, there is an increasing sense of danger and doom and at the least this can leave you unable to take in any additional information being taught, or being able to hear when someone is trying to reason with you.  

In school attendance woes this can look like fight- anger and arguing with you or a sibling, flight – avoidant of homework or getting ready for school in the morning, freeze- cannot get out of bed in the morning and fawn- being present but disconnected and not taking anything in (some people will talk about freeze and fawn as the same thing also). 

What’s unhelpful? 

  1. Blaming the parents and labelling them as enablers. 
  2. Forcing exposure to school as the main ‘remedy’. 
  3. Both force and blame prevent schools from picking up the early signs of school attendance woes and parents from accessing help early.

Not supporting the child with underlying stressors can result in stress burn out, or in some cases where forced exposure works in the short term, for many another episode of school attendance woes occurs and this time it will likely be more distressing and traumatic for the child requiring much more intensive support for recovery. For families, when a parent is held responsible to force their child into school without support to address the underlying stressors it can result in conflict and even breakdown of their relationship. Many parents often feel that what they feel is the right action to take to support their child, is scolded upon and dismissed, causing internal conflict for them too. 

If we are to truly support our child in recovery from school attendance woes, we need to have a combined approach of supporting the nervous system, identifying stressors, reducing the stressors and encouraging a focus that is wider than just school and schoolwork.

So, what is helpful?

  • Co-regulation

Arising from work on attachment theory, research in neuroscience on co-regulation is now plentiful. Co-regulating is when you use your own nervous system with the intention of supporting your child when emotionally dysregulated, to feel regulated again. Co-regulation creates a synchronised physiological state supporting the child’s sense of safety.  In essence creating calm in you to enable them to feel calm. Overtime it also helps our child build the skills to self-regulate too. That said, this journey for parents and carers is often filled with feelings of guilt, shame, embarrassment, and powerlessness. It’s easy to become dysregulated yourself as you strive to maintain control of the situation, it’s exhausting and relentless. For many to survive this experience, growing in self-awareness, challenging your beliefs, and healing old wounds are essential in enabling co-regulation, you can’t pretend to be regulated but when you are, co-regulation supports your child to feel safe. Only once your child feels safe can they begin to come out of the stress response. Only when your child is out of a stress response can you begin to identify the stressors and problem-solve.

  • Collaborative problem solving

Having a clear understanding of the underlying stressors is the best way to help a child overcome school attendance woes. When it is done collaboratively with your child you get a full understanding of the stressors and can address them. You also build the child’s capacity to recognise and understand their own stress responses, enabling them to notice them and act early, as well as teaching them how to problem solve. Including building their knowledge in what works for them and what doesn’t. Both skills will have a positive impact far beyond the school years. You also get to know your child well, helping you to advocate for them in school clearly and specifically. Inviting in schools and other health professionals to work collaboratively so that everyone is working in the same direction of addressing the underlying issues will give the most support to a child. Of course, collaborative problem solving is not easy. It is much more than “what happened?” and more of an ongoing conversation of observations, reflections, trial, and errors. Over my 20 years of working with teens I have identified these steps as being integral to problem solving with a teen: Observing behaviours and language, curiosity, TLC, validating emotions, asking open ended questions and giving space for answers, gentle humour, breaking a problem down into the smallest steps possible, apologies and forgiveness, seeing the bigger picture and knowing where and when to get help. 

  • Engaging the para-sympathetic nervous system.

There are two functions to the nervous system. The stress response for survival (sympathetic nervous system) and the rest and digest response (parasympathetic nervous system) to help revert the body back into a state of rest after a stress response. During the stress response you feel nauseous, have tummy ache, your heart pounds and you are full of adrenalin. For a child that has significant overwhelm or worry they spend a lot of time in the flight, flight, freeze, fawn stress response, but we can help them to access and stimulate the rest and digest system. Belly breathing is one example, we cannot slow our heartrate down on demand, we cannot order our blood to return to the bowel, but we can take control of our breathing. By focusing on slowing our breathing and lengthening the out breath, we send a physiological message to our heart to slow and induce the rest and digest response. For those that find focusing on the breath stressful there are many different simple exercises that can stimulate the vagus nerve responsible for rest and digest. Putting pressure on the roof of the mouth with your tongue, moving the earlobes, cold water splashed onto the face, humming, physical exercise. Like all new strategies, our child will be more open to learning them when they are not in a stressed space and when they see them used well by the adults around them. 

  • Having a desire other than overcoming school attendance woes.

The struggle is very real, it impacts every part of life and everyone in the family. The nature of the journey means that often there are immense amounts of pressure, usually brought on by other people’s well-meaning comments of how it should be addressed, social pressures from employment, education and worries about the longer term impacts. It’s no wonder that the whole day, their whole existence, can become about school attendance. So, giving your child and yourself permission to have something else in life that’s not school success related can be helpful. After all school is just a ticket to a career path that depending on what you choose to do after school you may or may not need. There are many people who have finished school and gone on to live a very fulfilling, successful life. There are also so many ways to access education no matter your age. We all know that education is a very powerful resource, but it’s no more powerful than having a love or a passion for something. Childhood is the beginning of learning about yourself and what you love and like and for many children who have struggled with school attendance woes, what they learn about themselves on the journey, through the love and support of family carries them a lot further in ways a school education can’t. 

So, what now? 

The impact of school attendance woes can be huge on your child and on your family. It can be a lonely journey and one which many families although survive are often not unscathed. While school doesn’t last forever, the relationship with your child lasts a lifetime. With the right support this can be a journey for you that creates trust and a close relationship with your child as you travel it together. Would you know what to look for? Would you recognise the early signs? Would you know what to do if you see them? 

It can start slowly but progress quite quickly and it often looks like other things, so often early signs get missed. Generally, children are still attending school when the early warning signs start and it’s much easier to intervene while they’re still there. When they or unable to go a day or two a week, it becomes so much harder and even more so when they are unable to go to school at all.

If your child demonstrates a reluctance to go to school most days, or days with certain subjects, if they often complain of feeling unwell, or if they have a hard time starting or completing homework, often with temper outbursts they could be showing early signs of school attendance woes. We encourage you to reach out to school to understand more about what is happening for them. 

We encourage you to take action early to understand your child’s underlying stressors and learn different strategies to support them in problem solving them. Get support for yourself so that you can self-regulate and then lend your calm to your child when they need it. Learn a little more about it to increase your capacity to support your child at home and in advocating for them at school, both are essential in reducing the impacts of school attendance woes. 

 

At Raising Great Teens, we have created an online self-pace course.

Leaning in with love, to thrive rather than survive.

There are 6 modules of content and include tips and strategies for you and for them, for accessing help and engaging with school (short videos, we know no-one in this space has anytime to themselves, let alone time and brain space to do an hour watching). The course was developed following many years of working with tweens and teens in all thing’s health and wellbeing. Supporting families to parent through the adolescent years in a way that builds and preserves the relationship with their tween and teen, creating life long, close and connected relationships. We do this through teaching co-regulation, providing a step-by-step approach to problem solving with your teen (specific to school attendance woes) and providing a community of support with others applying the same philosophies.

Being able to apply this work for my own teen during their struggle with school attendance woes has resulted in not just surviving the school years but thriving. We have thrived as individuals on our own personal development journey and in our relationship, with a deeper understanding of each other, and trust beyond measure. I can say with hand on heart that we not only survived, but we thrived, and you can too.  

If you feel the call or would like further information you can find us at https://raisinggreatteens.com/

And you can continue to follow us on https://www.instagram.com/raisinggreatteens/

Whatever you do, we wish you and your child all the best for school, for healthy, happy relationship with yourselves and with each other.