Tips for talking to schools about your child's anxiety

It's sensible to talk to your child's teachers as soon as possible if your child is worried about attending school.  However, sometimes these conversations don't go as well as we want, leaving parents feeling frustrated, invalidated and helpless.  Is there anything we can do to make these kind of conversations go better? 

A couple of years ago I came across a great book by Joseph Grenny and Kerry Patterson called "Crucial Conversations – Tool for Talking when the Stakes are High".  This had some absolutely brilliant suggestions for how to communicate when the stakes are high, opinions differ, one or both sides have strong emotions and the outcomes potentially have really important impact. This article is too short to explain the approach in full, but I thought it might be helpful to go over a few key points applied to the context of school anxiety. If you have time, I strongly recommend you either buy the book or search for videos or summaries online.

Think about the purpose of the conversation

I think there are two main goals when talking to your child's school about their worries.  The first is to work towards a common understanding of what the issues are.  The second is to identify some common goals that everyone is working towards. 

When talking to your child’s school, it’s really helpful to bear these goals in mind, because this will help you to stay focused if you get hijacked by strong emotions or if others start to disagree with you.

Gaining a shared understanding of the issue

It's very common for parents and staff to start off by having different opinions about what might be going on with a young person who is worried about going to school, And when you think about it, it’s easy to see the reasons why. As a parent, you know what your child says and does at home, but you’re not there to see how they act at school.  And likewise, school staff know what your child says and does at school, but they won’t know what is going on at home.  In addition, as a parent, you will have lots of information about things that may be happening in your child’s life that provide context to your child’s feelings (for example, a recent bereavement, or a house move). And the class teacher will know about aspects of school that may have an impact on your child, such as the friendship dynamics in your child’s class, or the relationship your child has with the class TA. 

It's much easier to build a support plan for a child when everyone involved is in agreement about the nature and extent of the child's difficulties. This is why keeping the focus initially on building shared understanding is so important. 

How to keep meetings with school staff productive and focused on the goal of coming to a shared understanding of the issues

• When we have high stakes conversations, emotions can run high. While this is completely understandable, strong emotions can get in the way of open dialogue – they can make people worried to say what they really think and can make some people defensive. And unfortunately, this will probably make it harder to achieve the goal of everyone openly sharing their thoughts. It’s therefore very important to try to keep our conversations “emotionally safe” by trying to keep our own emotions under check, but also noticing if the people we are speaking to are also becoming upset and reassuring them if necessary.  I appreciate this is much easier said than done! 
• At the start of the meeting, you could start by explicitly saying what you see the purpose of the meeting to be. g. “Thanks so much for agreeing to meet with me (again).  As I said before, the way Emily is behaving at home makes me believe she is very worried about coming into school. I’d like to share what I see at home and it would be brilliant if you could let me know about what is happening at school.  I think the more information we all have, the better we’re going to be able to understand what might be going on.  Does that sound OK?”
• You might also want to explicitly state a common goal at the beginning based on the desire to co-operate. For example, “I know everyone in the room wants the best for Emily, and I think we’d all agree that things will be easier to sort out if we’re all working together”.
• Then say you’d like to explain what you see at home. 
  • First, tell the facts, without interpreting them yet. For example, “Last week, Emily cried for 20 minutes after school on Monday, Tuesday and Thursday.  Every night for the last week, she has asked me at least three times before going to bed if she has to go to school and says she hates it.  In the last three days, she has become very upset, shouting and screaming at me for at least 10 minutes when it is time to leave for school and then refuses to leave the house.”
  • Once you have told the facts, move on to how you are interpreting the facts using  “When…. I….”  For example, “When Emily gets upset so often, when she begs me not to go to school and when it’s so hard to get her to leave the house to come into school, I feel there must be something about school that is causing her distress.”  
• Then invite staff to share their views. 
  • For example, you could ask, “I’d really like to hear your views on this?”.  
  • You can paraphrase what they have said, to show that you have listened and understood.  “So it sounds like you’re saying that once Emily gets into class, she’s a quiet for a bit, but gets on with her work well and seems quite settled, apart from in PE.  Have I understood that correctly”.
• If staff say your child is doing OK in school
  • Ask them to tell you more about what “doing OK” looks like and why they think this. Show genuine interest in what they say and try not to immediately discount their views.  It’s important that everyone in the conversation (teachers as well as parents) feel safe to say what they really think as this is the only way you will come to a genuine shared understanding of what is going on.  
  • Where you can, see if you can find agreement. For example, “I think we can all see that Emily gets worried about PE”.
  • Continue to explore what might be going on by comparing differing views. For example, “So it seems to me that you feel Emily is doing OK in school because you don’t see her being emotional. But from perspective, I feel there are things at school she is worried about and I think that because of what she tells me and how she behaves at home”.  Then ask them if they have any thoughts about why she presents so differently at home and school. You don't have to be shy of sharing your views about what you think is going on, but it's important to make it clear that you want to hear what the staff think as well.  So, "From my perspective, I think the reason is.... But I'd be really interested to hear what you think".  
  • If you have a hunch the teachers think something, but are not saying it openly, you might want to check this out. For example, “I hear you say that everything is OK at school, so I’m just wondering if you think I’m exaggerating when I tell you about how Emily is at home?” You need to be very careful about how you say this though.  It needs to come across as a genuine question and not an accusation.  Anyone who feels accused will become defensive and this will stop the sharing of information.
  • Hopefully, through the discussion and exploration, everyone will end up understanding the situation a little bit better. 
• Coming up with a plan.
  • It’s always a good idea to come out of a meeting with some kind of agreement about next step, who will do what and by when. 
  • If school is saying there is no issue, one next step might be to think about what information is missing from what is known so far. In many cases, this might be the voice of the child.  Lots of children find it difficult to say what they are worried about and your child may never have spoken to anyone in school about their worries.   If you are looking for a simple activity staff could use with your child to help them articulate their worries, see my previous article here.

As with all the suggestions in my articles, not every idea will work in every situation.  But the "Crucial Conversation" approach may be worth trying if you feel that school are brushing off your concerns.