School anxiety, is your teenager fearful of school?

Photo by Tanja Heffner on Unsplash

Parents, health professionals, teachers say it often ‘oh children are so resilient, they adapt don’t they’

This is usually said in the context of parents separating, moving schools, transitioning to secondary school ect. It is true in these cases that children/teenagers adjust to change and transition, but what happens if the child has experienced a traumatic incident, are they able to process this and move on?

I see young people in my counselling room that are experiencing school refusal due to severe anxiety, this anxiety is sometimes a delayed manifestation of a traumatic event that has gone unprocessed. The teenager believes it is a fear of school, but in fact it is trauma that is unprocessed, now setting off the flight or fight response, it is the body’s way of saying that the incident needs to be worked through therapeutically.

Sometimes incidents witnessed by children/teenagers can be rationalized and talked about at the time and it seems the teenager has dealt with it well and moved on. To the outside world she or he has coped, so it’s difficult to determine how much the event has impacted on the young person.

Trying to treat the symptom (anxiety) and not the root cause will not work. School refusal is sometimes a long-term thing, this is different than treating generalized anxiety in a CBT way and getting the child back to school because school want it that way.

Counselling can be helpful if the trauma is processed and the client feels heard and emotionally held within this experience. Once the client is starting to feel less fight or flight then the counsellor can look at the school refusal and help the teenager vocalise what is frightening for him or her.

It is worth keeping in mind that school refusal is sometimes about the teenager wanting to ensure that mum or dad is coping well by staying at home and observing and also feeling emotionally close.

Some examples of traumatic incidents that teenagers appeared to cope pretty well with at the time are:

Car accident (minor injuries)

House being burgled  

Traumatic divorce

Parent hospitalisation

Sudden complicated death of a grandparent 


Sibling mental breakdown

If you suspect that a certain event may have impacted your teenager in a traumatic way, you can check this out by asking about their sleep generally, they may mention waking in the night or a recurrent distressing dream.

You can speak to grandparents, teenagers may ask clarification questions to grandparents with the notion that speaking to you about it may prompt too much conversation or upset you. When you think you may know the root cause then you can ask for the right help from the correct organisation. You can meet with school and clarify to enable them to refer for help to the right place.  

I hope you have found this blog post informative and when looking for a counsellor it is important that some aspect of their continued professional development (after their core training) is trauma related such as workshops, online learning ect.