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.

Are you a journalist?

If this is for real, the answer is “never” for most parents. There are huge amounts of school holidays, as well as two days off out of every seven for weekends, so the kids get plenty of breaks and times to recharge. Also, I wouldn’t want to enforce the idea that school is somehow dangerous to your mental health while hiding at home is safe for your mental health. Neither are true.

Also, practically, DH and I both work full time. We can’t take days off just because a child doesn’t feel like going to school one day.

We don't allow DC days off school for mental health, firstly because we both work full time and secondly because we don't want to give them the idea that there is an option of staying at home. In DC1s case particularly, it would quickly escalate to full blown school refusal as they'd want to do it every day. My nephew started school refusing at secondary due to anxiety and ended up being out of school altogether for 2 years. It escalated extremely quickly once he started missing whole days.

During term time we keep demands low at the weekends and DC only do one extracurricular club each in the week. So they have plenty of unstructured down time which seems to be the most important thing for them at the moment.