Almost every kid complains about school from time to time. But for some children, attending school can be a major stressor. They may feel anxious at night, have outbursts in the mornings, or show signs of distress when the school day ends. Psychologists are often called upon to help kids with such difficulties, known as “school avoidance” or “school refusal.”
“But sending kids to therapy [for school avoidance] can send a really insidious message that the problem is with them,” said Naomi Fisher, PhD, a clinical psychologist and eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR) trainer based in Hove, England, who also struggled with attending school when she was a child. “That’s something I really try to emphasize in all of my work: the problem isn’t the kids. We actually have a system in which lots of kids can’t thrive.”
Fisher spoke to the Monitor about why some children struggle at school and how she helps families turn things around.
What do you mean when you say that some children “aren’t fine” at school?
I work clinically with lots of families and children who aren’t fine at school. What I mean by that is that children are showing us through their behavior that they’re not thriving. That can be a whole range of different ways—extreme meltdowns after school, or lots of worrying the evening before. Parents will tell me stories, like we can hardly get them to the car after school because they are so distressed.
Some of those children will exhibit distress at school, but a lot of them won’t. So, in a lot of cases, the school will tell parents they’re absolutely fine, and that the problem is at home. What they mean by that is they’re not creating problems at school. It’s common for children to hold their emotions in during the school day and to let it out at home when they feel safe–that doesn’t mean that the problem is necessarily at home.
The old-fashioned term for this was “school refusal” and many of the older techniques involved essentially forced kids to go to school by making life very unpleasant for them if they didn’t. They would be punished, or their parents were told to make home boring. Now there’s a lot more talk about emotionally based school avoidance, where anxiety is seen as the reason why children can’t go to school.
Within that, there’s the assumption that the problem is the child. This means that we think: If we treat the child’s anxiety, the child will be fine at school. But in the cases I see, it’s more about the way school is set up. I don’t think that as psychologists, we should be trying to make children fit into a system which doesn’t take account of their developmental needs. I see the children’s distress as feedback on that system, not as a sign of pathology in the child.
The school system stops kids from playing very early on, at ages 5 and 6. There’s more testing, more structure, and more academic pressure than there was when I was at school. School was not set up along psychological principles. When I hear about kids refusing to go to school, I say, maybe what we’re seeing is our children waving red flags, saying “there’s something wrong here.” Their distress tells us that something is wrong. But instead of looking at what might be going wrong at school, we’re saying we need to change the kids so that they fit better into that environment.
[Related: Back-to-school can be a stressful time. How to help your kids transition]
What advice do you offer to families who are struggling with this?
First, let’s think about how we can help this child learn, rather than how we can make this child go to school.
Some schools are actually really flexible and will work with families on this, for example, by building special relationships to make a child feel seen or known at school. One parent told me that their child really liked paper shredders. When the child arrived at school in the mornings, the receptionist would say: “I’m so glad you’re here. We’re going to do some shredding together.” That made the child feel welcome and seen at school; those kinds of things can make a surprisingly big difference for some kids.
If the school is not flexible at all, I would suggest that parents look for a school that can be more flexible. I’d also ask parents to look for ways to help their child learn outside of school and feel like they’re living a purposeful life. Sometimes when a child is really struggling at school, their whole life becomes about struggling at school—every week is dominated by getting to school, coming back from school, doing the stuff you were meant to have done at school. Set aside time when school is not allowed to intrude. That might mean pushing back on homework, for example, if getting it done in a reasonable time frame becomes a problem. Parents should feel able to say: “this is our home time and we don’t want it to be dominated by worries about homework.”
What changes could schools make to be more developmentally aligned?
A lot more play in the early years and less focus on a formal curriculum early on. Good [early child care programs] provide an enriched environment, where children can choose their activity and get support from interested adults. Those programs might offer water play, sand play, a home corner, a reading corner—and children are allowed to make choices.
The moment we take away their choices, which happens around age 5, we do something really profound psychologically that affects a child’s learning and motivation. We tell them that doing what they are told is more important than following their interests. The way we treat our children in school builds the foundation for an adolescence where young people are often really unmotivated. They don’t see the point, which I think is understandable. They’ve spent years being told that what they want and what they are interested in doesn’t matter.
For adults and younger children, we accept diversity in learning in a way we don’t between the ages of 5 and 18. If you ask adults how they learn, they’ll tell you that they read books, they watch YouTube videos, they talk to people—they have all sorts of different ways to learn, all of which are driven by their own desires. Why don’t we have the same faith that our young people have an internal drive to learn? I’d like us to see the task of educators as one of really nurturing that drive to learn, and of providing the right environment for it.
