Areas › Worry and anxiety › The cost of avoiding
A child coming back after weeks away is walking towards a mountain of missed work. Cut that mountain down before the return date, or it will punish them for coming.
Ask the school which pieces genuinely have to be made up and which can be written off, and get the answer in writing. What is left should be small enough to see the end of. Nothing undoes a hard first day back quite like sitting down at four o'clock in front of eleven weeks of catching up.
Qur’an and Sunnah
The moment you are freed of one task work on (Quran 94:7). Taken as a rhythm rather than a demand, that is how a backlog gets cleared, one piece at a time.
فَإِذَا فَرَغۡتَ فَٱنصَبۡ
The moment you are freed [of one task] work on
Qur’an 94:7read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
A systematic review and meta-analysis comparing exposure with cognitive therapy in anxiety disorders found that approaching the feared situation carries much of the benefit. It compares whole treatments, so single ingredients cannot be cleanly separated out. The practical reading here is to protect the approach: if a child is going to do the hard thing, the rest of the day should not be arranged so that doing it goes badly.
Ougrin D. (2011). Efficacy of exposure versus cognitive therapy in anxiety disorders: systematic review and meta-analysis.. BMC psychiatry doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
If going back is followed by something miserable, going back is what gets learned as miserable.
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
Every adjustment should arrive with the date you will start reducing it. Written down at the beginning, while everyone is still reasonable.
On a day at home, be the person who supervises rather than the person who keeps them company. The warmth is not cancelled, it moves to the evening.
Two weeks away is the point to stop waiting and ask for help. A year away is beyond what one appointment a week can carry.