Practices

When your partner is distressed, the answer is not a fix but your presence: be with them, feel it with them, stay.

Disconnection is healed less by solving the problem than by emotional presence, being genuinely there, attuned and engaged, so your partner does not…

Let them tell the good story twice.

Sharing a joy and being met with delight makes the joy larger and the bond warmer.

Ask which kind of support they want today rather than deciding for them.

Sometimes it is help, sometimes only company; asking spares you both the wrong gift.

When your partner is up against something, take their side: this is our problem, we will face it together.

Even if you see the other side, do not side with the enemy against your partner. Stand with them first.

Once today, ask about a stress from outside the two of you, then just listen. No fixing.

Twenty minutes on their side. Your only job is to understand and be on their team.

Once a day, take turns unloading the day's outside stress while the other just listens and supports, not fixes.

Ten minutes each on stress from beyond the relationship. The listener gives empathy, not solutions.

Be firm and warm at once: gentle tone, steady eyes, clear ask. Neither doormat nor bulldozer.

Softness of manner and firmness of content are not opposites. Hold the point kindly.

Ask plainly: name the facts, say how you feel, say what you want, in a few clear sentences.

Drop the hinting. State the situation, your feeling, and the request. Clear is kind.

The target is getting through the door, not feeling calm about it. Calm tends to arrive afterwards, and mostly for people who went.

It is tempting to wait for a good week, a settled mood, a morning that feels different. Waiting hands the decision to the anxiety, and the anxiety…

Put it the way a grandmother would. Eat your peas and carrots and then you can have your pudding: go in, and then the thing you have been wanting.

Technical language falls out of your head at seven in the morning. A homely sentence survives, and it survives the argument too, because it is hard…

Parents keeping a pattern going are almost never doing it knowingly. Say so out loud, before you explain any of the rest.

A parent who hears that their comfort has been part of the problem will either argue or quietly stop coming, and both of those cost the child far…

When a young person will not go in, social fear is the most common thing underneath. Start there, before anyone reaches for words like lazy or defiant.

Ask about the parts of the day with other people in them: the corridor between lessons, the dining hall, being called on, changing for sport, walking…

Listen for the moment a young person starts explaining why home is better. A preference with reasons attached is much harder to shift than plain distress.

Distress you can soothe, and then move through together. A worked out case, less demanding work, nobody staring, no awkwardness at lunch, is…

Not every child who is not at school is frightened of school. Some are kept at home by what is happening there, some have decided the place is not worth it, and some are angry about one specific thing.

The child looking after an unwell parent, the teenager who has written the school off, and the one who cannot face the corridor all look the same on…

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…

Ask when it began and what that first week was like. What now looks like a teenager enjoying their freedom often started as fear that nobody could reach.

Patterns drift. A child frightened of the dining hall in September can, by March, be a young person with a settled day at home and a set of arguments…

There is a particular good feeling in getting out of something you were dreading. Give it a name at home, because it is exactly what makes tomorrow harder.

Children recognise this straight away when it is put plainly: the lovely feeling when you find out you do not have to go. Adults know it too, in the…

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.

This is not a punishment and it should not sound like one. It is about a sum the child does without noticing: if home offers the same day with none…

If a child can go to the school office whenever they like and stay as long as they like, that is an exit rather than a support. Agree a length, and a gap between visits.

Ten minutes, twice a day, with a return to lessons afterwards, is a support. Open ended visits from the first flutter of nerves onwards teach a very…

Every adjustment should arrive with the date you will start reducing it. Written down at the beginning, while everyone is still reasonable.

Supports meant as a bridge have a way of becoming the new normal, and by the spring nobody remembers they were temporary. Decide at the outset what…