Part 3: School Avoidance Is Not What You Think. . .

I was talking with a friend recently who attended a presentation on “school anxiety.” The school counsellor focused on behavioural strategies to manage school avoidance, but my friend felt like the talk was missing the mark. As both a parent and a counsellor who has lived through and seen this play out many times, I completely agreed with her.

School avoidance . . . .Wow.

This is a topic I have avoided writing about for a long time. In my previous blog posts, you can see me touching on it here and there. In therapy, I call this “touching the bruise.”  We skim over it, then move away, and only when we are ready do we press on it and really feel the pain underneath. For me, this is a deep wound, and even skimming it brings up pain and heartache.

Recently, I saw a post about “the school refusal iceberg,” and it helped me conceptualize what is really happening below the surface. From the outside, people see school avoidance. They see a child who won’t go to school. But underneath, there is often so much more.

Some of the signals aren’t just refusing school. It can look like leaving early, anger, shutdowns, stomachaches, headaches, crying, or huge barriers just to leave the house in the morning. From the outside, it can look like defiance or anxiety. But often, it’s neither of those things in isolation — it’s a nervous system that feels completely overwhelmed.

One of the biggest things that didn’t work for us was CBT (Cognitive Behavioural Therapy). CBT focuses on identifying thoughts, challenging them, and changing thinking patterns in order to change behaviour and feelings. For many people, CBT is incredibly helpful. But for school avoidance, especially when there are learning differences, autism, sensory issues, burnout, or past school trauma, it doesn't work - and it didn’t work for us.

There were no thoughts we could challenge that suddenly made school feel safe. There were no new ways of thinking about school that made the building less overwhelming, the noise quieter, the social situations easier, or the workload more manageable. If anything, it took us further away from the real problem, because we kept believing that our child needed to think about school differently, instead of asking whether school was actually working for our child.

If school avoidance were just about changing thoughts, every child would be back in school tomorrow. But for many kids, school avoidance isn’t about thoughts — it’s about safety, capacity, nervous systems, and environments that don’t fit who they are or what they need. Too often, we aren’t really listening to understand what is actually happening for them.

And until we start looking below the surface of the iceberg, we are going to keep missing the mark.

As well as sharing other tips and how to navigate this as a parent, I also want to mention a book I recently started reading, The Kids Who Aren’t OK, by Ross Greene. To be completely honest, I haven’t finished it yet. For those who haven’t read my previous posts, I have ADHD, so I usually have about five books going at once (along with about four therapy courses). But even though I haven’t finished it, this book has already been incredibly helpful and validating as a parent of kids who have struggled with attending school.

One of the biggest takeaways so far is this: schools are often reactive, not proactive. This means that for many kids to get support, they have to struggle — sometimes for months or even years — before they are identified as needing help. Then there is a second hurdle, where the need for support has to be justified in order to access resources. And often, the resources that are put in place are more like band-aid solutions that don’t actually address the root cause of why school isn’t working for that child in the first place.

As I write this, I realize it might sound like I am criticizing schools and teachers. I’m not. Most teachers and school staff are doing their absolute best with very limited resources, large classrooms, and systems that are stretched thin. This is not about blaming individuals — it’s about recognizing that the system isn’t built for all kids, and some kids fall through the cracks before anyone realizes how much they are struggling.

My hope is that over time, conversations like this and ideas like the ones in this book can help shift things so that kids are supported earlier — before school becomes overwhelming, before anxiety turns into shutdown, and before families feel like they are fighting a battle they were never prepared to fight.

Back to school avoidance....

What didn't work:

• Reward systems

• Consequences

• Taking things away

• Big rewards for attendance

• Gradual exposure

• Forcing attendance

• Carrying a dysregulated child into school

• Telling them they had to go

• Telling them they would be fine once they got there

What I have learned over time is that you cannot reward or consequence a nervous system into feeling safe.

If a child feels unsafe, overwhelmed, or incapable, no sticker chart in the world is going to fix that.

I don’t think there is one solution, but there are things that make this journey more manageable for both kids and parents.

So what does help?

1. Relationship first, school second. If your child feels like you are on the same team, everything goes better. If they feel like you are trying to force them into something that feels impossible, you become part of the problem in their eyes and are not to be trusted.

2. Regulation before expectations. A dysregulated child cannot learn, problem solve, or walk calmly into a school building. Focus on calm first, school second.

3. Reduce the pressure in the mornings. Mornings often become a battleground. Sometimes reducing demands, simplifying routines, or even changing the goal (for example, just getting in the car, or just driving to the school) can help.

4. Look for patterns. Is it worse on certain days? Certain classes? Certain teachers? After poor sleep? After social events? There is almost always a pattern.

As an example - Ironically, school often became harder after a substitute teacher had been in the classroom. The substitute felt safe, calm, and predictable. But when the regular teacher returned and yelled at students for being “bad” for the substitute, the sense of safety disappeared — and school avoidance often followed.

5. Find one safe adult at school. This can make a huge difference. Kids often don’t go to school for academics — they go because there is one person there who understands them.

6. Celebrate very small wins. Walking into the school. Staying for one hour. Getting out of the car. Entering the parking lot. These may seem small to others, but they are huge for kids who are struggling.

As I’m writing this, I realize this is a really tricky area to talk about. I would encourage parents to find a counsellor they trust to help navigate this with their child. Many approaches to school avoidance are based on exposure therapy — slowly increasing time at school — but this often doesn’t work for kids who have underlying learning, sensory, social, or emotional challenges. We don’t want our kids to just push through, suppress their feelings, and mask all day. That might work short term, but it’s not the long game, and is damaging to long term mental health. The long game is understanding what’s underneath the school avoidance, addressing those challenges, and trusting that kids will do well when they can.

7. Stay calm (or at least look calm). This is incredibly hard. When your child isn’t going to school, your nervous system is not calm either. You are worried about attendance, academics, judgement, meetings, the future. But if both nervous systems are in panic, nothing improves.

8. Remember this is not your fault. And it is not your child’s fault either. Please find a community or a counsellor that can understand and validate your experience. This is hard, and its a long road when you are on it all by yourself.

9. Sometimes the goal is survival, not perfect attendance.This was one of the hardest things for me to accept. Sometimes the goal is mental health, safety, and keeping your relationship with your child intact — not 100% attendance. Find a place that accepts good enough, and can celebrate small wins with you and your child.

10. Play the long game. This is not usually fixed in a week or a month. This is often a long, slow process of rebuilding safety, confidence, and capacity. Listen to your child and validate their experience.