Areas › Worry and anxiety › The cost of avoiding
A long stretch at home is never neutral time. It teaches two things at once: staying away stops the dread, and staying away is pleasant.
That double lesson is why a few months out is so much harder to undo than a few days. First comes relief, then the slow morning, the screen, the quiet house, and after a while the child is not only escaping something but arriving somewhere better. If a long absence cannot be avoided, keep a thread or two back to school alive, however thin, so there is something to walk back along.
Qur’an and Sunnah
Do people think they will be left alone after saying 'We believe' without being put to the test (Quran 29:2). Time away does not buy an exemption from the thing itself.
أَحَسِبَ ٱلنَّاسُ أَن يُتۡرَكُوٓاْ أَن يَقُولُوٓاْ ءَامَنَّا وَهُمۡ لَا يُفۡتَنُونَ
Do people think they will be left alone after saying ‘We believe’ without being put to the test
Qur’an 29:2read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
One study of obsessive compulsive symptoms found that experiential avoidance, the effort to not have unwanted thoughts and feelings, explained symptoms beyond what beliefs about danger accounted for. It was cross-sectional, so it cannot say which came first. What it supports is that the avoiding is doing work of its own rather than merely following on from what a person believes.
Abramowitz JS, Lackey GR, Wheaton MG. (2009). Obsessive-compulsive symptoms: the contribution of obsessional beliefs and experiential avoidance.. Journal of anxiety disorders doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
Something that both takes away a bad feeling and hands you a good one gets learned twice as fast.
When not to
A child kept home for genuine medical reasons is a different situation, and the plan for them belongs with their doctor.
This one is still a draft. It is waiting on a scholar and a clinician to read it before it is published.
Near this one
Missing school is not one thing. There is pleading that folds, pleading that becomes an hour of protest, arriving late, arriving and then sitting in the nurse's room by eleven, and not arriving at all.
When someone with attention difficulties loses the structure around them, the difficulty shows in full. Nothing has got worse in them; the scaffolding that carried part of it has gone.
Most of these stories begin with one of four things: a change, a person, an assessment, or a loss. Working out which one tells you what the fear is really about.