It is NOT your parenting! When school is no longer welcoming for your child.
You sit in that plastic chair again, the one that’s never quite the right height. A cold able between you and the people with solomn faces, who speak in bullet points about YOUR child’s life. They don’t see your chid’s meltdowns, tears, sleepless nights, night terrors, sweat and fear. In the morning, they don’t see your begging and the pleading, the fear that you have failed. Failed your child, failed their learning, failed the school, the fear you have of those fines. Threats of fines and courts make you feel you are a criminal, when you are trying everything within your power. You feel like you have failed but you HAVEN’T. The system has failed your child and laid the blame on you. Rest here my dear. Know you are not alone!
“Make home less comfotable” as if your home’s a theme park resort! Not that home is the only place where their nervous sysyem isn’t under attack. “Take away the games” as if it is that simple. As if regulation is a reward. “Stop pandering to them” like there is a choice and not a child in fight or flight. Supporting your SEN or anxious child is not pandering, understanding them not an indulgence. Yet this is how they speak. As if they have lived it, as if they know!
Their suggestions look promising as they scribble them on paper. Charts, targets and ‘specialised support plans’ in words and not in actions. Always promised but in reality never delivered. Words like reasonable adjustment, with too few actual helpful adjustments. Without any actual reason in sight. Most of all, they make it sound rare. Like yours is the only child struggling to go there! Like it is a parenting flaw. Not because the system is built without kids like ours truely in mind.
On the playground it feels the same. Side glances. Parents who don’t understand. “Why don’t you just make them go?” As if it were that simple. As if you hadn’t tried until you cried.
Then you find places like this. Ever growing groups of parents and kids fighting those same silent battles. A growing issue in a failing system. One day you find your tribe. That parent, provision or tutor who ‘gets it’. The mum’s with tired eyes and fierce love in their hearts. The ones who don’t ask for justification. The one’s who just let you both breathe! The truth is, our kids aren’t refusing. They are surviving. Burnt out from living in survival mode. Trying to navigate a system that is too much for them to handle. EBSA (emotionally based school avoidance) isn’t school refusal. It’s root is emotional and a stress response. From years of masking or trying to carry on when needs are unmet and anxiety levels have been too high for too long.
Please come and find your tribe and know: You are not alone! There are options out there.