'Crippling fear'- School avoidance a huge issue as one mother 'tried everything' she could

On any given day in Ireland approximately 60,000 children do not show up for school.

School avoidance is becoming more and more common in Ireland as parents struggle to try and get their children to go to school each morning.

The numbers of calls to Parentline on school avoidance have doubled over the past two years and in 2022 one in almost every ten calls related to school avoidance.

Speaking recently on Supercharged with Anna Geary, an Irish mother said: "we have been on a journey of emotion-based school avoidance for the past two and a half years with our teenage daughter."

The mother told Anna Geary that it began almost out of the blue with stomach pains, wanting to come home early from school and escalated quite quickly to "absolute inability to go to school".

"We tried everything...the bribes...the encouragement...firm approach...the punishment almost...the promises.... but nothing seemed to work."

The mother explained that her daughter was so emotionally dysregulated and this led to emotional inability to remove herself from the car and walk through the school gates.

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The woman told Anna Geary that in Ireland this problem is becoming more and more prevalent and as a mother and teacher she now understands that more education and understanding must come around the topic of emotionally based school avoidance.

"They are not bold they are not lazy they are not lacking interest....our daughter has suffered greatly and so too have we...this crippling sense of fear... this has brought us to a sense of hopelessness in our home and in our family life that I never knew could be," she said.

School avoidance can make parents feel as though they have somehow failed, even though it is generally not their fault, according to Parentline.

The key, according to the support website, is to get the child to overcome their fears and get back into the school system.

"The longer a child avoids school, the more difficult the habit is to overcome. Times of transition can also present challenges for children, so school avoidance can be a particular issue among those starting school, again at the other end of primary school and then in the first couple of years of secondary school," Parentline says.

For support on the topics discussed in this article, you can visit Parentline here