School Refusal, Anxiety, And Separation Struggles (REVISIT)

Today's discussion is on school refusal, which to be honest, in what I was going through and researching everything, putting together my lit review, it seems like most things it's linked to so many other.

Yeah, there's not one, not

one answer to school refusal.

Well, and it's so interconnected with every aspect of a child and parent's life that this is applicable to more than just school refusal and separation anxiety.

Where to begin?

Can I begin? Of course.

I wanted to talk to Scott about school refusal.

First off, I think it's a topic that you are interested in learning more about.

But second off, I would say in our therapy practice, it's something that we're seeing constantly right now.

I think rates of school refusal are higher in our practice, at least, just based on my own observations.

We are getting parents daily messaging the practice, looking for support for their children, all different ages, who are refusing to go to school.

And I would say in all my work as a therapist, I've seen this since the beginning of my work as a therapist, you know, pre-pandemic.

But I would say the last couple of years, especially, it just seems like this is just a theme that's coming up over and over.

So that's why I wanted to talk about it because I know it's something a lot of parents struggle with.

And most parents that come to my practice who are struggling with it feel like their kid's the only one.

And they often say to me, we never got to refuse to go to school.

Like, how did we get here? So I just thought it would be a really helpful and hopefully interesting discussion.

Yes.

Actually, in the research that I looked through, I specifically was trying to find information on or data on pre and post pandemic.

Because I have a theory that that has made things worse.

It doesn't create school refusal, but it's just amplified things because we got into habits over two years, year and a half, two years of like... essentially shut down here, right? And kids were rarely actually in school for that time.

And then parents were working from home more often or all the time and it sort of threw everything out the window that we had done previously.

And what I found was that there has been a significant increase in absenteeism in children and refusal to go to school.

Estimates are, they're saying roughly it's increased by double, but the theory is not that the pandemic caused that.

It's just that it's amplified all of these other things that were already causing kids to want to stay home from school.