School Refusal and Your Child With Mental Illness

For a child with mental illness, school refusal can be common. School can be anxiety-provoking for children with mental illnesses (School Anxiety in Children: Signs, Causes, Treatments). School refusal is anxiety-provoking for parents. Working parents have the added layer of inflexible timelines. Being late to work daily may get them fired, and the employer doesn't necessarily care about our struggles with our children. So what can we do as parents to get our mentally ill children past school refusal?

The Anxiety Behind School Refusal for Mentally Ill Kids

Childhood school anxiety is very common. In fact, it's the third most common reason kids miss school. So understanding school refusal means understanding childhood anxiety.

This is forefront in my mind because it happened today. My son constantly complains about school, and I have feared for years that he may simply refuse to go. He's tried in the past but was small enough that I could pick him up and put him the car myself. He's too big for that now, though, and if you touch him during an outburst, he's more likely to harm himself or others. Usually, though, he limits his school-anxiety to yelling every morning. He takes an hour to put on his clothes or refuses to leave without a post-breakfast snack. This is frustrating, but he still goes.

Today, though, he flopped on the floor like a five-foot sack of flour and refused to budge. I threatened to remove privileges. I attempted bribes. Eventually, it devolved into yelling, and then he closed his door to finally get dressed, only to open his window and sneak outside.

By the time I got him inside and got meds and food in him, I had to bow my head and cry while my daughter hugged me. It was two hours past school start time. It was four hours since I first woke them.

How to Deal With School Refusal

Here are some tips for parents of students with school refusal.

Number one is to remain calm (note: I failed).

I'm most emphatic about this tip, though: not allowing "crutches". I can't allow my child to come home early or stay home from school if it's avoidable. Staying home is a reward. He liked out-of-school suspensions, for instance. After the first, he would act out in class and say he was trying to get in trouble so he could go home. We worked with the school to make sure suspensions were always in-school if his behaviors weren't dangerous.

I've mentioned it before, but working with your employer to get intermittent leave is life-saving. It gives me more leeway to deal with days like today without fearing I'll lose my job. No, I'll take that back. I still fear I'll lose my job, but it's less likely with intermittent leave.

School refusal from mentally ill kids can feel like a punishment for working parents. It affects our livelihood, and we run the risk of growing resentful of our children as a result. I have met resentful parents of children with mental illnesses, and it's hard to watch. I can't imagine what it feels like for their children who surely notice it. So get help from the school, work, family, or therapy if needed.

Remember to Take Care of Your Feelings Too

I'm still trying to manage my own feelings following this morning's school refusal debacle. Here are a few things I try to think about to keep the aforementioned resentment away:

1. I love my children, pains-in-the-butt though they may be sometimes.
2. My son is intuitive, sensitive, and intelligent--all in part because of his childhood mental illness.
3. It can be rough for now, but he'll one day be a unique and multi-faceted adult.
4. He still has the opportunity to grow out of this.

Yes, the last one is shaky, but let me have my optimism for now. I need every little bit of it.

* Between 70-80% [of children] carry [ADHD] into their adult life to a varying degree.