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)
I took the phone. it made things worse.
The advice was to make home less comfortable. The phone was the obvious variable — several clinical justifications ready, I had been doing a lot of reading. So I took it. What followed was a fight that took hours to come back from, and a lesson about which variable actually needed changing.
how to work with your school when your child can't attend: what parents actually need to know
At some point in most school avoidance journeys, the relationship with the school becomes its own problem. Here's what rights you actually have, what to ask for, and how to have better conversations with the people who hold a lot of power over your daughter's education.
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.
how anxiety shows up in the body — and why your daughter's stomach ache is real
The stomach ache arrives at 7am, right on schedule. It disappears by mid-morning on a day she stays home. The symptoms are real — here's the neuroscience of why, and why it matters for how you respond.
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.
what does "emotionally based school avoidance" actually mean?
EBSA — emotionally based school avoidance — is a term you may have started seeing everywhere. Here's what it actually means, why it replaced older terms that are still in common use, and why the framework matters for your daughter specifically.
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.
7 warning signs your daughter may be heading toward school avoidance
Most parents don't see it coming. Here are the seven early warning signs of school avoidance — and why they're easy to miss until the pattern becomes impossible to ignore.
the art of shutting up (which I have not mastered)
She says she needs a minute. I say okay. Then I wait two minutes, which in school avoidance parenting years is approximately one geological epoch, and I go back in. On the art of shutting up — and why I haven't mastered it yet.
she was fine on the weekend. sunday night changed everything.
The Sunday cliff and the 6pm dread that arrives before you've done anything wrong. What I think I've started to understand about it — and the part where it stopped being just hers.
the morning I stopped saying "you have to go"
There was a particular version of mornings that I got very good at. I had a script for it and everything — the gentle knock, the chirpy opener, the escalation. You have to go. You have to go. I got very efficient at it. What I couldn't see, from inside that sequence, was that I was running it entirely on the wrong assumption.
"school refusal" vs. “school avoidance”: why the words matter
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.