Maybe you found this place because something shifted recently — a pattern you finally have a name for, a conversation with a school counselor that sent you searching, a morning that was bad enough to make you type words into Google you never thought you'd type.

Or maybe you've been in this for a while already. You're not new to the parking lot negotiations or the Sunday night dread or the particular exhaustion of explaining your situation to someone who responds with "have you tried just making her go?" You're past the beginning. You're just stuck, and tired, and looking for something that actually helps.

Either way, you're in the right place. And I mean that in the least bumper-sticker way possible.

What this is

rise & try again is a blog about school avoidance — specifically about navigating it as a parent of a daughter in middle or high school, in real time, without a tidy ending yet. I write about what the research says, what the school system can actually offer you (more than most parents realize), what it looks like to find the right professional help and what it feels like to be in the thick of this on an ordinary Tuesday.

I am not a therapist, a doctor or an education specialist. I'm a parent, like you, who got very motivated to understand this thing that had taken up residence in our lives. Everything I share that is research-based I'll tell you where it comes from, and I'll always point you toward professionals for the decisions that need them.

What I can offer that a professional can't is the view from inside the house — the unglamorous, nonlinear, sometimes darkly funny reality of what this experience is actually like. That part I have covered.

What school avoidance actually is (and isn't)

If you're early in this, it's worth saying clearly: school avoidance is not defiance. It is not a phase. It is not the result of bad parenting, too much screen time or insufficient consequences. It is an anxiety-driven pattern in which the distress of going to school — whether that's social anxiety, academic pressure, a specific fear or something harder to name — becomes overwhelming enough that your child genuinely cannot get herself there.

The word "genuinely" is doing real work in that sentence. This is not a choice in the way that choosing to skip gym class is a choice. The physical symptoms — the stomachaches, the headaches, the sudden flu that evaporates by 10am — are real. The fear is real. The relief she feels when she stays home is real, which is exactly what makes this so hard to break without the right support.

It also affects girls disproportionately, which is something researchers are paying more attention to now, and something I write about here because understanding why matters when you're trying to figure out how to help.

A note on what you'll find here

Some posts are practical and research-based. Some are personal essays — my experience, written carefully to protect my daughter's privacy, but honest enough to be worth reading. I think both matter. The information helps you act. The essays, I hope, help you feel less alone while you're doing it.

I won't always have the answer. I'll tell you when I don't. I'll also tell you when something I thought was true turned out to be more complicated, because that happens too and pretending otherwise would make this just another place on the internet that makes you feel like everyone else has figured something out that you haven't.

Nobody has figured this out. We're all just figuring it out.

The parents who find their way to a blog like this at whatever hour you're reading this — you are not the ones who gave up. You're the ones who kept looking. That matters more than it might feel like it does right now.

Welcome. I'm glad you're here.