why october and november are often harder than september
September gets all the attention. And then September ends, and a lot of families exhale, and then October arrives and something shifts and nobody warned me it was coming. I spent two Octobers confused about why things were getting harder before I understood what was actually happening.
the books and podcasts that have actually helped
Yesterday's post was the practical list , organisations, helplines, websites, what to do and in what order. This one is the more personal version. The things I've actually read and listened to, some of which were exactly what I needed at exactly the right time.
you can't get your child through the school gates. now what?
One of the things I wish I'd had in the early days of this is a sequence. Not a list of organisations, not another explanation of what school avoidance is, but a practical answer to the question that was actually keeping me up at night: I can't get her to school. What do I actually do now, and in what order?
the dread arrives in August. here’s what to do with it.
August 10th. Five weeks until school starts, give or take, and the calendar that looked so reassuringly far away in June is suddenly not far away at all. The school meeting is booked, the emails have been sent, the plan exists, and still there is something sitting in the chest that the plan hasn't touched.
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.
how to use the summer to prepare for september (without making it feel like homework)
If you have a school meeting coming up, or you're just in the middle of it and could use something concrete to hold onto, the free guide below covers word-for-word responses for the conversations that don't go the way you hoped.
the post-covid rise in school avoidance: what the data actually shows
Before my daughter stopped going to school, I had a vague sense that this kind of thing happened to some kids, somewhere, occasionally. I did not have any sense that it was happening at a scale significant enough to have its own research literature, its own clinical terminology, or its own entry in a BMJ journal article with the phrase "perfect storm" in the title.
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 (not so) hidden connection between neurodivergence and school avoidance in girls
I went looking for something else entirely and found the number that stopped me cold: in one large study of kids experiencing significant school distress, 92% were neurodivergent. If your daughter is struggling to get to school and neurodivergence hasn't come up yet, this might be the post that finally makes the pattern make sense.
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.
what if therapy isn't helping? (and the thing nobody in the system will say out loud)
What if the constant focus on the anxiety — the appointments, the check-ins, the careful monitoring, the conversations about school and how school is going and what we're going to do about school — is making things worse rather than better? It turns out there is research on this. More than I expected.
the 5:50am briefing
I have been awake since 4:30am, not because an alarm went off — I stopped needing one months ago — but because my brain has quietly decided that this is simply when the day begins now. I get up at 5:30. At exactly 5:50am I go into her room. Not at 5:48 and not at 5:52 but at 5:50.
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.
if your child is finishing the year online: what to think about, and how to approach september without catastrophising
Some students are finishing this school year online. Not because they chose to, but because it was the option that allowed them to finish at all. On what to think about now, how to use the summer well, and how to approach September without catastrophising.
the grief of the end of the school year (when you're not counting down to anything)
end of year burnout in school-avoidant teenagers: what it actually is and why anxious kids hit it harder
The school year has about six weeks left. And if your daughter is struggling more than usual right now — more withdrawn, more exhausted, more resistant — you are not imagining it. Here's what academic burnout actually is, and why anxious teenagers hit it harder than their peers.
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 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 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.
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.