School Avoidance Is Not Pathological
It’s often a completely reasonable response to stress, distress, and trauma
When I was a kid, I tried to fake sick almost every day to avoid going to school (after a while it stopped working, but I kept trying anyway).
It wasn’t because I was “lazy” or “manipulative”.
It was because I was scared.
I was scared because I was relentlessly and ruthlessly bullied every single day of grade school, and no one did a thing to intervene or stop it, even when I tried to get help.
If they had, I might have actually enjoyed going to school. I found academics easy to the point of being boring, but I liked playing outside and playing sports in gym class.
If, rather than assuming I was just “trying to get out of it”, the adults sought to understand why school was so aversive to me, they may have figured out there were serious underlying reasons. Maybe they could have even done something — anything — about it.
Instead, my mother took me to the doctor who advised my mother to take my temperature. If I didn’t have a fever, she was to send me to school. She even learned to stay in the room when taking my temperature, so I couldn’t put the thermometer under a lightbulb.
All the adults in my life assumed I just didn’t want to go to school because I’d rather stay home and watch T.V. No one thought to ask whether there was something in particular I was trying to avoid.
The real lessons learned
When we force children to do things that cause them distress, we are teaching them to ignore their own bodies and minds in favour of obedience.
We’re sending them a message that their discomfort doesn’t matter, they’re expected to “suck it up” and do what they’re told.
I’m not saying we should let our children stay home and play video games all day, I’m really not.
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