when you're not on the same page (and your child can tell)

The best analogy I have found for co-parenting through school avoidance is trying to keep a boat afloat while rowing in completely different directions, which produces a specific kind of forward momentum that is not actually forward momentum at all but a very effortful kind of going around in circles — and the worst part, the part that took me longer than I'd like to admit to fully register, is that there is no captain. Nobody is steering. And somewhere in the middle of all of this, while the two adults in the boat were arguing about which direction to row, the teenager climbed up and took the wheel, which is not a metaphor I am using loosely. She genuinely has the wheel. I'm not sure when she got it.

This is what co-parenting through school avoidance actually looks like, at least some of the time, and I think it is more common than people say out loud — partly because it involves admitting that the adults in the room are not aligned, which none of us particularly wants to admit, and partly because it is the kind of thing that is hard to describe without it sounding like a complaint about someone specific, which is not what this is.

Sometimes one person thinks she needs to be pushed harder — that the accommodation has been too generous, that the reason she can't go to school is that she has been allowed to stay home, that a firmer approach would produce results. The other person has read what the research says about anxiety-driven avoidance and the effect of pressure on a nervous system that is already overwhelmed, and has tried to explain this, and the conversation has gone in circles, and it comes up again the next morning at 7am when nobody has the bandwidth for it.

Or it's the other way around — one person defaulting to structure and pressure because the anxiety of watching this unfold makes them want to do something, and the something that feels most available is firmness, and the other person absorbing her distress and softening everything, and both of them secretly wondering whether the other one is making it worse, and neither of them saying that directly because the mornings are hard enough already.

Either way, your daughter can see it. Children who are already anxious are particularly tuned in to the emotional temperature of the adults around them — not because they are manipulative, though it can look that way, but because they are anxious, and anxious children are very good at reading rooms and very bad at not being affected by what they find there. A split in approach doesn't just create logistical problems. It creates an interpretive problem for a child who is already trying to figure out whether her distress is legitimate or manageable or something she should be able to push through, and if two adults in her life are giving her completely different answers to that question simultaneously, the confusion that produces is not nothing.

Getting to the same page is not always possible, and co-parenting relationships bring their own history into every conversation and a disagreement about how to handle school avoidance mornings is rarely only about school avoidance mornings. Sometimes the gap is too wide, or too loaded, or sitting on top of other things that have nothing to do with any of this. I am not going to tell you that a good conversation will fix it, because sometimes it won't.

But a few things seem to help, or at least to help slightly, which is the most I am willing to promise.

Trying to align on strategy at 7:15am when she is in her room and neither of you has slept is not going to work — the middle of the crisis is the worst possible time to have the structural conversation, and anything said at that hour in that emotional state tends to make things worse rather than better. If you can find a time that is not the morning, not right after a bad day, not within earshot of her, the conversation has a better chance of being a conversation rather than an argument that ends with both of you more entrenched than you started.

If you are operating from completely different frameworks — one of you thinks this is anxiety, one of you thinks this is behaviour that has been reinforced — the conversation about what to do will keep going in circles because you are arguing from different premises. Something external to react to together, rather than just reacting to each other, can help: a clinician, an article, a book, anything that gives the conversation somewhere to land that is not one person's word against another's.

And if full agreement feels impossible — which it sometimes is — it may still be possible to agree on a floor. A few things neither of you will do in front of her, to her, about her. A consistent floor, even an imperfect one, is better than visible disagreement in the room she's standing in, and children doing well in recovery from school avoidance tend to have adults around them who are at minimum not actively undermining each other, which is not a high bar but is a real one.

What I have not managed to solve is the wheel situation. She still has it, and I am not entirely sure how to get it back, and some days I am not entirely sure she should give it up — she has opinions about her own nervous system that are worth taking seriously, and there is a version of the co-parenting disagreement where both of the adults are so busy arguing with each other that nobody has actually asked her what she thinks, which is its own problem. But that is probably another post.

For now: you are not the only one rowing in circles. And if you have found a way to get the boat going in a single direction, I would genuinely like to know how you did it.