Does anyone else have an anxious child/ school illness faker, I'm exhausted already

[Snarrf]

DD is 13 and under SEN register for this ongoing issue.

She has school anxiety and last year was such a bloody battle

She was 98% fine over summer holidays which cements to me that this is a school issue, not genuine physical illness. (I know it is a mental illness though!)

She's been back in school a week. The first few days were OK and I stupidly thought maybe this year would be better.
Midweek she started saying she felt sick/tummy ache/headache. All the usual.

Phone calls at 2am to tell me she feels poorly. Texts. Refusing to get dressed.

Her brother has started at the same high-school and she's already made him late.

The school is very aware of all this and she is constantly in the office /nurses office.

She said she felt ill this morning and that she had thrown up. She was sent to school as advised (if I kept her off everytime she said she had been sick she would have 10% attendance)

The school rang to say her brother was sick and could I go get him.

He had awful stomach pains and struggled to walk home with me and went straight upto the toilet with the runs.

Thing is, DD is going to be livid that he was sent home when she is 'never believed'.

Im just so tired and fed up of dealing with this all the time.

I don't know how to deal with it.

@Snarrf It is SO common for autistic girls, particularly those who are cognitively able to become obvious and/or hit crisis point at they get to their teen years. Have a Google about autistic masking in females. This can come out an anxiety. Yes your daughter may well have read up on it online. That may have made her realise that those 'things' that she wants to do but hold on/masks are actually normal for her and she now feels freer to do them especially in front of you at home where it's 'safe'.

She might not be neurodivergent. But she might be and you owe it to her to find out. You can go about this two ways. Independent assessment (around the £1500 mark for ASD only, must be compliant with NICE guidelines including the diagnosis report to be relied upon for educational support) or via the NHS accessed through CAMHS referral. CAMHS will take YEARS, no exaggeration in my area it's around 3y at the moment.

Let me tell you about a little girl, in the 90s, who met all of her milestones, lots of them early. Who was academically advanced, bright and curious, made friends, went to parties, was a noisy chatterbox, loved loud music, behaved perfectly at primary school, and who showed no real outward signs of being autistic or concerning behaviour. The wheels started to come off a bit in secondary, she was anxious she started acting out at home and being the class clown at school. Being 'ill' all the time. Wanting to avoid going for no 'real' reason. Started to find friendships hard to navigate but not speaking up because she was ashamed that it seemed like people didn't like her. Secretly self harming but didn't know why - she has nothing to be sad about! Had awful low self esteem. Got herself suspended on a few occasions and was constantly told that she was wasting her potential and no one understood why. Labelled as a chatterbox, a disruptor, as someone who when challenged eventually by the time leaving school age rolled around didn't respect any authority. School were glad to see the back end of her.

She passed her exams, but nowhere near as well as she could have done. Went to college for A-Levels and couldn't cope at all with self organisation and independent study. Dropped out of college and got a job.It wasn't 'couldn't cope' though. She was just lazy and disorganised.

She had several jobs, never lasting long because she always ended up rubbing people up the wrong way without realising and leaving. Finally found a job that she was good at, using the skills she had but working solo mostly. She overspent wildly, compulsively and irresponsibly as a young adult, and always had issues with her weight because she couldn't control binge eating. She partied hard, drinking far too much, endangering her personal safety on many occasions and smoking incessantly. She learned to drive but it took her six attempts and until her mid 20s to pass and she couldn't understand why she was so stupid at something so simple to other people.

She eventually met her husband, settled down, paid off all debts by doing well in her job. It suited her, working quietly on her own, writing. They bought a house and had children in her thirties.

One of those children was diagnosed as autistic, very young. No one in the family believed the mum because they said they child was perfectly 'normal' - that she was just like her mum was when she was small! The mum attended courses to learn about autism to help her child because she was in shock and had never met an autistic person before, knew nothing about it.

Then came the lightbulbs moments. Two years and two assessments later, aged 37, she was diagnosed as autistic with ADHD. Life made sense - including everything that life was like as a child, teen and young adult.

That little girl is me.

Please get your daughter checked out. Don't let her get to nearly 40, with a lifetime of unexplainable behaviour behind her thinking she's a broken useless adult before she understands who she is and why she's like she is. It's life-changing to find out and at her age now it's a massive advantage.

She might not be. She might just be your perfectly neurotypical teen, being a huge pain in the arse like teens can do or neurotypical but suffering from clinical anxiety that needs to be got to the bottom of. Or she might not be, and she does need to know (as do you).

Good luck.

I dont think you should pay too much attention to those posts OP

Its important that children are listened to and you have listened to how she feels about school, she is nervous and anxious about going in but ultimately loves her school and enjoys it. Therefore the job is to look at how that feeling is managed.

The balance is do you try to obtain interventions that aim to remove the feelings or interventions that aim to help her manage the feelings and ignore them

I take it she has had hormone tests within the testing?

Ive found my anxiety comes and goes in a different way now due to the menopause, plus my utter intolerance for noise which I never used to have

OP you have come on here to ask for other peoples opinions whist appearing to only want to receive the ones that support your narrative, that school is the best place for us.

Many of us have experiences that cause us to worry that this might not be in your daughters best interests either because we have had children who have been traumatised by being in unsuitable environments or because we were that child.

What do you want from the thread exactly?

Sorry that should have said 'school is the best place for her' .

1500 isn't viable for us. I didn't think it would be that much!

I could save it but it would probably take as long as a charms referral. Money is extremely tight right now.

It is, sadly, for an assessment and diagnosis report that are NICE compliant. Around here anyway. Might be different where you are. Services are so stretched even the independent clinics have long waiting lists.

I was looking for support from other parents who are going through the same thing, who are tired of it after years. I didn't come here to be told I'm doing the wrong thing when I fully believe I'm doing the right thing.

And FYI, I have a 17 yo son who I removed from college for his MH issues, but his situation was very different. So I'm not aginst removal from education if I believe its the right thing to do, just in my daughters cause I don't.

I believe the best place for my daughter is school.

Directly after posting this message I will be hiding this thread so I won't read or reply to anymore messages.

But thanks to everyone who replied, I understand your responses were out of concern for my daughter but to write down EVERYTHING that puts the situation in CONTEXT would take hours and I just don't have the energy or the desire to have our whole lives and choices picked apart.

But thankyou.

Unfortunately I think 1500 is highly optimistic, you're looking at 3k where I am

I didn't come here to be told I'm doing the wrong thing when I fully believe I'm doing the right thing.
But some of us have been your daughter and you don't want to listen to us. We are only trying to help you because we have been through it.

Anyway, I hope you get it resolved for your daughter's sake.

She is saying to you that she thinks she is autistic, but you don’t seem to want to believe her, preferring the idea that she has researched and could be pretending. Why is this idea preferable to the idea that she is right?

You are thinking about a private psychiatrist. Why not spend your money on a private autism assessment instead? She is actually telling you that she has done research and believes she is autistic, that is a massive signpost yet you want to find a reason that id pure mental health, rather than talking her own knowledge of herself seriously.

You say she says she doesn’t know when you ask her why age doesn’t like school. But she does know. She told you already. But you wouldn’t hear or believe her. So instead, they carries on telling you what you want to hear instead. What she wants to believe herself.

@bellac11 we paid £1800 and I found a couple of places that charged similar.

Actually @bellac11 I think you're right. We paid £1500 for my child's three years ago. Just checked the same clinic and it's £2200 now. So yeah £1500 is optimistic!

The OP really does have her fingers in her ears about anything that is questioned or doesn't suit her.
I imagine her daughter has to deal with this too...could be a factor in her anxiety.

Totally agree.

The OP only wants to hear what she wants to hear whether it be from her daughter or from others.

I sincerely wish her daughter all the best and I hope she finds the answers.

I’m not saying she has but don’t rule it out completely . I have Just read some of your replies op and I just wanted to say I have heard a lot of children especially girls it coming out as autism when they reached secondary school age. Like there was absolutely no signs until they reached a teenager. My daughter has autism and I never really noticed until she was a lot older and now she’s 12 it’s a lot more obvious . She suffers more with anxiety and like your dd feels sick , tummy ache has headache etc never wants to go to school .

We commission a huge number of them at work and yes the prices are quite shocking

My DD was like this from the age of about 15, missed an awful lot of school, constantly felt sick, stomach ache, we never did get to the bottom of it. She said there was no bullying etc, she had lots of friends, bright (didn't seem to struggle at all).

She was like a different person when she left school, and has developed a fabulous work ethic. School just doesn't suit some kids, it can be brutal as others have said.

Sympathy OP as I remember very clearly how stressful those years were, it almost broke up my marriage as DH's attitude was very much "force her to go, she's taking the piss", despite usually being quite a loving sympathetic dad.

Plus comments/opinions from friends and family ... usually along the lines of me being a bit of a walk over.

Your DDs mental health is far more important than education at the moment 💐

School anxiety is very little understood. Until you have a child or young teenager with these issues its so hard to understand.
l don't agree re over exposure, in some instances as in phobias yes, but not concerning school anxiety , if that method worked they're wouldn' t be thousand of parents all at their wits end on the Not Fine At School forum who have been forcing their kids in no matter what for years only to find it did more harm than good.

How on earth is managing to do every well academically at the school?

do you know what her absence rate last year actually was?

You are thinking about a private psychiatrist. Why not spend your money on a private autism assessment instead? She is actually telling you that she has done research and believes she is autistic, that is a massive signpost yet you want to find a reason that id pure mental health, rather than talking her own knowledge of herself seriously.

op - you’ll spend your money on a psychiatrist and I reckon she will urge to listen to your daughter and take her findings seriously (and she will no doubt suggest that get an assessment done because she suspects ND)