october in 10th grade, and why this one feels different (but sadly still the same)
We are in the thick of it again. Things didn't get easier, not exactly, and if this reads like a "we turned a corner" post, I've written it wrong. What changed is the lens.
you know you're a parent of a school-avoidant child when...
While other parents are buying pencil cases and new water bottles, you are restocking your bag with face wipes, a lint roller, an eyelash curler, and propranolol, because looking like you have it together is a skill you have had to learn from scratch.
the push and pull between what your gut says and what the school expects
I have gotten very good at nodding in school meetings. I nod when the attendance officer explains the referral process, and when someone says something that I know, from what is at this point a genuinely embarrassing amount of reading on the subject, is not quite how anxiety-based school avoidance works.
we don't have a plan for 10th grade and I am doing great
It is July. September is six weeks away, give or take, and I have not yet successfully answered the question of what 10th grade looks like for my daughter. I have, however, created several documents, attended two meetings that ended without resolution, and read the same three articles multiple times as though they might say something different on the fourth pass.
she gets herself to camp every day. I have questions.
My daughter is a camp counselor this summer. She gets up, she gets ready, she gets there. Not without the occasional logistical wobble, not without some mornings that require more navigating than others, but she gets there. Every day.
oh, you just have to get her to school
People mean well. I want to start there, because what follows is going to sound uncharitable, and I am trying very hard to remain a person who extends good faith to others, which is something I have to remind myself of more frequently than I'd like since we started navigating this particular situation.
the questions aren’t procrastination
For a long time I thought she wasn't listening. I thought she was procrastinating, buying time, running out the clock on a morning she didn't want to move through. What I understand now is that the questions were never procrastination. They were a form of self-reassurance.
when you're not on the same page (and your child can tell)
Trying to keep a boat afloat while rowing in completely different directions produces a very effortful kind of going around in circles. And the worst part — there is no captain. Somewhere in the middle of all of this, the teenager climbed up and took the wheel.
she refused to go to therapy. so I went first.
There is a particular kind of exhaustion that comes from being caught in a loop that has no obvious exit. The school needs a therapist. The therapist needs a child who will attend. The child won't attend. And the school is waiting. On the catch-22 nobody talks about — and what I did when I couldn't find a way out of it.
she is not her school avoidance
Somewhere in the middle of all of this — the appointments, the school meetings, the forms and the phone calls (the endless phone calls!) — it is possible to lose sight of something important. Your daughter is not her school avoidance. She is a specific, particular, unrepeatable marvel of a person who is somewhere in the middle of becoming whoever she is going to be.
the grief of the end of the school year (when you're not counting down to anything)
the days you lose it (and how to come back from them)
Every parent of a school-avoidant child has days where they lose it. Here's what that looks like, what the guilt feels like, and how to come back from it.
what's your school avoidance parenting style? (a totally scientific quiz)
A completely rigorous, evidence-based personality assessment for parents of school-avoidant children. Sharpen your pencil. Try not to read ahead.
the signs were there. I just didn't have a name for them.
I filed the stomach aches under: she's a worrier. I filed the Sunday evenings under: she doesn't love Mondays. I filed all of it neatly, in folders that made sense at the time. None of the folders were labelled school avoidance.
if you're in the middle of it — the slow mornings, the sunday evenings, the conversations with the school that don't go the way you needed them to —
this is for you.
get a note in your inbox each week. no advice you haven't already tried. just a parent who's in it too, and the occasional thing that's actually helped.