Mental health days?

[Klippin]

Parents of children who struggle with school anxiety – how do you approach mental health days?

I’m interested to hear how other parents navigate the balance between allowing their child time off school to recover emotionally and avoiding inadvertently reinforcing school avoidance.

How often do you allow your child a mental health day, and what circumstances would make you feel it’s genuinely needed?
How do you distinguish between a child who really needs time to recover and one who might benefit more from being gently encouraged to attend, despite feeling anxious?

My biggest question is how do you prevent mental health days from reinforcing the belief that they can’t cope with school when they’re feeling anxious?

And how do you avoid getting into a cycle where one recovery day gradually becomes more frequent absences?

I’d really appreciate hearing what has worked for other families, particularly those who’ve managed to find a healthy balance between supporting their child’s emotional wellbeing and maintaining school attendance.

No days off.

We handle mental well being outside school. One of ours are ASD so we do know the challenges.

No days off. Dd hated school, never wanted to go, she went every day even if they sent her home. She has autism. Letting children stay home is rewarding them, when dd got sent home (at least a couple of times a week) she had to come to my work and sit working on the desk next to mine, mental health is complex but with her I know she didn’t want to go to school so would be “faint” “dizzy” etc

Actually I went the other way to pp- dd was missing a lot of days or getting in late so I did a total reset and the next time she said she couldn’t go to school I said ‘that’s ok, I can see you’re tired so why don’t we have a reset day’ and I left her to it. The next day she went to school no problem and said that now she knew she could take the day off without arguing or feeling bad about it it lifted a weight off her shoulders

she does still miss the occasional day but now I trust her to be able to identify if she is just too burnt out/overwhelmed and I am better at recognising it. we’ve also worked on ‘catching up’ at the weekend so she’s less tired during the week

she has adhd

eta I guess it depends why they don’t want to go to school. Dd doesn’t actually dislike it and is happy to go but sometimes it’s just too much for her. Today she got home early because last period was cancelled and she fell asleep on the sofa

There is a massive difference between finding things challenging but being ‘ok’ and, for example, autistic burnout.

for the former, DC goes in to school. For the latter, there is no way they could even physically get ready in the morning, so there is no option but for them to stay home.

I'd try to avoid missing days as much as possible. I do worry that now days children are said to have 'anxiety' rather than understanding that sometimes we can feel sad, worried, angry or whatever. All emotions are fine and normal and it's how we learn to manage them that is important. It seems that people don't like their children to feel uncomfortable and do everything to shield them from this. In life we will come across difficult and stressful situations and it's important that we acknowledge this will happen and learn to manage it.

That being said, I'd hope work was being done to help her understand what the thing is that is making her feel anxious and sometimes short term measures can help. For example one child at our school found wearing the uniform hard, they were allowed to wear own clothes, gradually working up to the jumper being worn and so on until they could cope with the full uniform. Some children benefit from coming into school a few minutes early when the classroom is quiet and without all the hustle and bustle going on and this can make separating from parents easier. Many children have benefitted from time with our ELSA, sometimes working through a programme or simply giving the child to chat and have space and time for just them. Little adaptions which can help them but still expects attendance at school.

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They need to go in. In life, there’s time when there’s no time to recharge or take a time out, you just need to get on with it. Helping your kids learn this will help them out immensely for life.

Plus, as always with these type of things, once you allow one, they’ll want more… more frequent, more lengthy…. Best way is a clear crisp boundary: none.