Supporting Kids and Teens Who Won’t Go to School

School refusal, or school avoidance, is a tricky topic that more and more families are encountering. McLean’s R. Meredith Elkins, PhD, helps us to understand how we can help a child or adolescent who is resistant to attending school.

Find resources and more about the expert below.

What Is School Refusal?

School refusal refers to a pattern of behavior associated with difficulties attending school or remaining in classes, and overall it involves a failure to meet age-appropriate expectations for school attendance.

This can range from difficulties in the morning and having some resistance to going to school, to leaving class repeatedly and going to the nurse’s office, to complete and sustained refusal to attend school.

There’s no diagnosis of school refusal because it refers to a pattern of behavior. And there are many reasons why kids might avoid school.

According to Elkins, “Our clinical program treats emotionally based school avoidance, meaning school refusal behavior that’s motivated by anxiety, obsessive compulsive disorder, or depression.”

Treatment works by helping kids to manage the anxiety or the OCD that might be motivating their school avoidance.

“Know that if your child is avoiding school, you’re not alone. And that if it feels hard, it’s because it is hard,” says Elkins. “We do encourage parents and educators to take school refusal seriously.”

Because it’s so reinforcing when kids get to stay home and it is such a slippery slope, it can become harder and harder to get back to school the more kids have avoided school.

It may involve individual therapy for the child, medication management, collaboration with school personnel and with teachers, and caregivers making important and sustained environmental shifts at home to set kids up for success.

How Should Adults React?

If your child is refusing school, first and foremost, you want to make sure that you understand why they’re refusing school. We want to start by ruling out all possible medical issues that might be contributing to school avoidance.

We also want to assess any true school-based threats to person or property, such as bullying or harassment. And if bullying and harassment is going on, this is something that needs to be addressed directly with school personnel and law enforcement if needed.

For kids who are avoiding school because of anxiety and related concerns, know that children may not always be able to identify that that’s why they’re avoiding school, that that’s why they’re feeling anxious.

Parents and educators should be on the lookout for physical complaints that often accompany anxiety. This can look like headaches, stomach aches, complaints of feeling nauseous or just not feeling well, which are ways that kids sometimes communicate that they’re feeling anxious.

You also want to look out for any unexpected changes in behavior: increases in irritability, difficulty with sleeping or eating regularly, changes in activity patterns in general. All of these might be indicators that a child is experiencing distress in school.

Get curious, talk to your child in moments of calm, reach out to their teachers, reach out to school personnel. It really does take a village to assess and understand and importantly treat school avoidance.

Setting Kids Up for Success

If your child is refusing school, know that it takes an active and multi-pronged approach to set kids up for success.

First things first, we want the home environment to replicate the school environment as much as possible.

This is because if your child is struggling to attend school and finds home much more cushy—they can play video games, they can sleep, they can eat their favorite snacks and snuggle with their dog—it’s just going to make it that much harder for them to do the difficult work of attending school when they feel anxious.

We want to make sure that the home environment is structured, that children don’t have the opportunity to do things that they wouldn’t ordinarily get to do during the school hours, like watching television, and that they’re focused on their academics while they’re at school. We need home to be boring so that the alternative of going to school is more exciting, relatively speaking.

We also want to create a reward system, try to motivate school attendance, and, importantly, institute and stick to a set of consequences for not attending school.

Key Takeaways

Fighting back against school refusal involves a number of aspects of the child’s life. We can’t expect that kids are going to confidently walk back into school after learning a few coping strategies. We need kids to learn some tools to help them manage their anxiety.

We need caregivers to commit to sustained environmental shifts at home and to collaboration with school personnel in order to help the child to be successful.

We find that when kids and families understand the link between anxiety and avoidance, and then, when they’re motivated, build up skills to fight back against that anxiety, we can really see kids and families thrive.