Areas › Worry and anxiety › The cost of avoiding
A shortened day, a pass on presenting to the class, a modified deadline, a quiet place at lunch: worth asking for when they let a child stay in the building rather than leave it.
The test for any adjustment is simple. Does it get them into the room and keep them there, or does it save them from the room? A shortened day that ends with three lessons attended is practice at the real thing. A note excusing attendance altogether is the opposite, however sympathetic it sounds. Ask for the ones that make the step smaller, and put them in writing through whatever formal plan your school uses.
Qur’an and Sunnah
Yet he has not attempted the steep path (Quran 90:11). A path is climbed in sections, and the sections have to be climbable.
فَلَا ٱقۡتَحَمَ ٱلۡعَقَبَةَ
Yet he has not attempted the steep path
Qur’an 90:11read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
In a randomised trial for generalised anxiety disorder, what carried improvement in symptoms and quality of life was the fall in experiential avoidance. Those were adults with a diagnosis, and a mediation analysis describes a route rather than proving one. It gives a workable test for adjustments: the good ones leave less avoiding overall, not more of it wrapped in paperwork.
Eustis EH, Hayes-Skelton SA, Roemer L, Orsillo SM. (2016). Reductions in experiential avoidance as a mediator of change in symptom outcome and quality of life in acceptance-based behavior therapy and applied relaxation for generalized anxiety disorder.. Behaviour research and therapy doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
A step you can actually take teaches you the place is survivable, and a step you cannot take teaches you nothing.
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
When the schoolwork is finished early, what follows is chores and dull jobs until the school day would have ended. The good things wait for the hour they would have waited for anyway.
Physically taking a refusing child should be rare, and only with a young child, two adults at home, two staff waiting at school, and a plan for keeping everybody safe.
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.