Areas › Worry and anxiety › The cost of avoiding
Where a child is not attending, the adults are often already cross with each other. That argument has to be parked before any plan will hold.
Home thinks the school did not act. The school thinks home is not firm. Both usually have a point, and neither point can be settled quickly enough to help this child this term. Meanwhile a plan applied one way at home and another way at school teaches a young person exactly where the gap is, and they will use it, not from malice but because it is there.
Qur’an and Sunnah
So keep to the right course as you have been commanded, together with those who have turned to God with you (Quran 11:112). The word together is carrying real weight in that sentence.
فَٱسۡتَقِمۡ كَمَآ أُمِرۡتَ وَمَن تَابَ مَعَكَ وَلَا تَطۡغَوۡاْۚ إِنَّهُۥ بِمَا تَعۡمَلُونَ بَصِيرࣱ
So keep to the right course as you have been commanded, together with those who have turned to God with you. Do not overstep the limits, for He sees everything you do
Qur’an 11:112read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
In a worksite trial with 107 distressed employees, acceptance and commitment therapy and stress inoculation training both reduced distress, although they start from quite different premises. It is one trial in one setting and says nothing about who was right about anything. It does suggest that arguing over whose method is correct can matter less than settling on something and doing it consistently.
Flaxman PE, Bond FW. (2010). A randomised worksite comparison of acceptance and commitment therapy and stress inoculation training.. Behaviour research and therapy doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
A plan that two sides apply differently is not one plan, and the child notices the difference before the adults do.
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
Staff who think a child is playing them will respond in ways that make school worse. A short explanation of how avoidance actually works changes what happens in the corridor.
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.
Offer school again at ten, and at eleven, and after lunch. One refusal at half past seven should not be allowed to decide the whole day.