What to Know When Your Child Is Scared to Go to School

If you are a caregiver and your child is scared to go to school, you are not alone. Experts estimate that anywhere from 5 to 28 percent of students may experience school avoidance each year. If your child falls into this statistic, you know how painful and challenging this can be.

Though not an official mental health diagnosis, the research on school avoidance indicates its roots are usually in emotional issues, largely anxiety-based. Research also indicates that a team-based approach is essential to helping students re-engage in learning.

At the school I help oversee, where school avoidance impacts many students, I've learned that the most important member of this team is you, the caregiver. You are the expert on your child, the historian of what has worked (and what hasn’t), their primary support, and the point of contact for professionals. You are the case manager overseeing the team.

Knowing how anxiety works explains why pushing back on it is essential, and stressful—especially for you as their caregiver. Understanding anxiety also helps everyone lead with empathy and compassion, while staying away from shaming or blaming your child (or you!).

Breaking Down Anxiety

When the limbic system (the alarm system of your brain) tells the body it is in danger, it sends stress hormones to prepare the body to fight, flee, or freeze. The brain then stores the trigger of the fear so it knows to avoid it in the future.

In school-based fear, there may have been an initial stressor: a difficult peer interaction, a challenging class, even bullying. Long after this stressor is resolved, the alarm system can continue to fire, creating an entrenched neuropathway.

Avoiding school becomes the norm, which comes with real physical impacts. Each time your child's amygdala fires to warn the body of what the brain perceives as a major threat—essentially, the equivalent of a lion chasing them—the body shuts down non-essential systems to redirect energy to the fight/flight/freeze response.

Your child may feel nauseous as her gastrointestinal tract shuts down—after all, there's no need to digest a bagel if a lion might eat you. Remembering what she was taught in math or processing a new lesson is similarly not needed; every ounce of energy goes towards fight/flight/freezing from the "lion."

"Retraining" the brain that school is not a lion, through cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) or exposure response prevention (ERP), is the best practice for responding to this type of fear. Your child must be exposed to the trigger of school in order to allow their body and brain to see and feel they are safe. As their brain/body relearns that school is safe, their anxiety will decrease.

Learn About Your Own Response to Anxiety

Your child’s anxiety is there to protect them. But in this pursuit, it will demand certainty and comfort at every turn, which may lead them to believe that you are pushing them to go to school even though it will harm them. Anxiety is lying to them—so to help them, you will need to persevere past their protests. Identifying your own stress response will be key here: Are you a fighter, freezer, or fleer?

As a mom caring for children with anxiety, knowing how I reacted to their pain ensured my own anxiety didn’t get in the way of their healing. My response to stress is to fight. At the first sign that my children were in pain, I would call providers, write emails—anything to help them. Sometimes this response made me sound pressured—even angry—as my desperation to help increased.

The longer this went on, the harder it was to care for them. I became pickled in stress hormones, leading me to forget appointments and struggle to sleep, eat, and communicate effectively. Eventually, I became frozen in fear (often a secondary response when fight/flight fails).

I had to learn to regulate my own anxiety response; only then could I help them regulate theirs. For me, that meant pausing before reacting, asking for help from others, and developing my own coping skills (exercise, meditation, box breathing).

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Stay Out of Shame and Blame

When my children were struggling the most, I believed I was failing at parenting. Many of the caregivers I work with express similar feelings: “I should be able to help them go to school,” or “Everyone blames me and thinks I could do more.” These feelings of shame are undeserved and have much the same impact as a stress response.

At the school I help oversee, we talk to caregivers about the importance of dialectical thinking: allowing complex ideas to coexist with a both/and, not an either/or.

• My child is struggling, and I am doing my best to help them.
• I don’t know how to help, and I can ask others to help me.

Give yourself grace—this is hard work. Empathy is the antidote to shame, so make sure you and the team lead with this. As you will need to trust this team implicitly, be aware of professionals who may use shame as a motivator. Research indicates this may happen when they reach the limitations of how they can help, but this will only erode trust.

Don’t Give Up!

If your child is still stuck, and exposure work is not working well, do not give up! There is always more you can do.

At the school I am at, we have found that when students seem stuck, clarifying the DSM-5 diagnosis with evidence-based screening tools can help. Is this social anxiety, panic disorder, or perhaps overlooked obsessive compulsive disorder? Knowing this will ensure you are using the correct intervention.

Also, make sure you have your team rule out medical causes to your child’s mental health issues as well. We have found that many of the most avoidant students have missed medical issues, such as PANS/PANDAS (pediatric acute-onset neuropsychiatric syndrome/pediatric autoimmune neuropsychiatric disorder associated with strep).

Keep working as a team, keep working on exposing your child to their anxiety, and keep trying! Your child deserves to feel safe in their world; they deserve to be with their peers, and you deserve to feel hopeful that healing is possible.