Should I wait or do something now? School anxiety.

Should you wait it out or do something now? If your child is worried about school, it's a question many parents ask.

So most kids will have some days when they just don't want to go into school. Maybe they're fallen up with a friend or they've got a test coming up, or everything just feels a little bit overwhelming. If your child is mostly happy about school and this just feels like a one-off situation, then it's absolutely fine just to give it a bit of time. And many worries do settle all by themselves.

But if the worries carry on for more than about two weeks, or if your child is really highly distressed, then that's the point that you need to start being more proactive.  In the first instance, that's probably going to mean talking to their class teacher or their form tutor. Children can be really good at hiding how they're feeling from staff in school and so staff might not even realise that there's a problem. So sharing what you are seeing at home may make them understand, and school staff will often have information that you don't have that might shed light on what's going on. So for example, has there been a change of staff, has a friendship group blown up or there might be just something else that's affecting your child in school.

And together you might be able to come up with some changes that might make a big difference for your child. For example, if they're finding reading tricky, could they have a little bit of extra support for their literacy? Or if they've fallen out with a friend, can the seating plan be changed so that your child sits next to somebody else for a while? Could they go somewhere quiet during break time if they're finding the playground noisy and overwhelming?

Even if you don't find solutions at this stage, what you've done is you've opened the conversation and staff can keep an eye out on your child to find out a little bit more about what's going on.

In my experience, children very rarely develop very high levels of distress about school overnight. Usually there are these early warning signs. It's much easier to help when we act early rather than waiting until worries become bigger and more entrenched.

So if your child's worried about school, it might be worth asking yourself, is this likely to pass? Or is this now the time when I need to take much more proactive action?

 And if you're trying to understand what might be going on for your child, you can download my free school anxiety checklist - this will help you to unpick some of the things that might be going on for your young person.