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Tips for Subsiding Back to School Anxiety
Sutter Center for Psychiatry
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by David Rue, MD, Child Psychiatrist
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A child with an anxiety about school, whether the child is a kindergartener or a second grader, will show the anxiety about starting school with an attitude of indifference. He or she is not enthusiatic about shopping for school, or any talk about school. Eventually, the child will have trouble falling asleep as the school day gets closer. The telltale sign of "school phobia" is sudden physical complaints on the morning of the first school day, such as stomachache, headache, dizziness, physical fatigue, etc, and these symptoms can look rather genuine and serious; if pushed, he or she will complain of these physical symptoms with some drama. Rarely, will the child say, "I am nervous about going to school."
The underlying dynamics of "school phobia," is a fear of being separated from parents, most often, mother. Parents can prepare the child for school with many short practices of separating from and reuniting with the child throughout the summer, lengthening the period of separation on each opportunity to help develop the child's emotional toughness of being away from a parent. These youngsters with separation fear often are the children of the parents who themselves have an anxiety about being away from their child to begin with, and the parents often act "baffled," but they will fess up in a private conversation that they themselves had the same anxiety as a child, and they "empathize" with their child a lot. They need a referral to a child therapist with an experience with helping these kids and their parents.
The most common fears are the often unspoken: the fear that something bad, tragic would happen to their parents while they are in school and no one can help the parents in danger--serious accidents, personal attacks, deadly serious illness like coma, seizure. However, the most often complained about are the scary teachers and janitors, mean kids, spooky bathrooms, etc.
The majority of kids with the "normal" first day jitters can be prepared for by their parents: take a car ride to school, and take a walkthrough the campus, including the bathroom, before school starts. If the child is shy, help send a post card to the teacher and ask the teacher for an autographed picture of her or him, or help arrange a brief welcome-to-school phone call from the teacher. Help the child with the memories of all the fun times they had in school (for the returnees) or other activities away from home and with the kids (for the beginners), but subtly, ever so subliminally. Arrange play time with kids who go to the same school, if not the same class. Help her or him with the thought of the fun activities after school at home as a reward for a good day in school.
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