Areas › Worry and anxiety › The cost of avoiding
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.
Writing down which of those happened each day gives you something to watch. Most of the real movement, in both directions, happens inside days that would go down as present, and an attendance register hides all of it. A child who used to leave at eleven and now stays until two has had a good week, and should be told so.
Qur’an and Sunnah
Take action! God will see your actions (Quran 9:105). Small movement counts and is seen, even on a week the register says nothing changed.
وَقُلِ ٱعۡمَلُواْ فَسَيَرَى ٱللَّهُ عَمَلَكُمۡ وَرَسُولُهُۥ وَٱلۡمُؤۡمِنُونَۖ وَسَتُرَدُّونَ إِلَىٰ عَٰلِمِ ٱلۡغَيۡبِ وَٱلشَّهَٰدَةِ فَيُنَبِّئُكُم بِمَا كُنتُمۡ تَعۡمَلُونَ
Say [Prophet], ‘Take action! God will see your actions- as will His Messenger and the believers- and then you will be returned to Him who knows what is seen and unseen, and He will tell you what you have been doing
Qur’an 9:105read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
Researchers building a measure of psychological inflexibility in young people showed that the mix of avoidance and getting tangled in thoughts can be scored rather than left as an impression. That work was about developing a questionnaire, so it establishes that the thing is measurable, not that any particular scale suits your child. The principle carries over: put a level on it and change becomes visible.
Greco LA, Lambert W, Baer RA. (2008). Psychological inflexibility in childhood and adolescence: development and evaluation of the Avoidance and Fusion Questionnaire for Youth.. Psychological assessment doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
You can only encourage what you can see, and a yes or no register hides nearly everything.
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
The target is getting through the door, not feeling calm about it. Calm tends to arrive afterwards, and mostly for people who went.
Whoever is standing in the hall at half past seven needs to understand the trap as well as the child does. A plan agreed on a Tuesday afternoon will not survive a Wednesday morning otherwise.
Find one adult in the building the child already trusts, and have them meet the child at the entrance. The doorway is the hardest minute of the day.