Coping with school refusal

While a very difficult issue to resolve, school refusal could have some identifiable causes, and if my long distant recollections of school are valid today, you might be able to explore some of this.

Classrooms are collective participation environments. If you are on the autistic spectrum you cannot hope to keep up with this. For one thing there's a sensory constraint on how much you can take in, and also some limitation in what you absorb from collective instruction (ie when the teacher addresses the whole class). You can be struggling to follow the lesson.

Under stress, such as above, you tire easily, and concentration may diminish rapidly, and even daydreaming is likely, so you are more than usually likely to have attention drawn to you for not paying attention. Also some autistic children pay attention with their ears rather than their eyes, and appear to the teacher to be looking away.

Humour in a classroom can be particularly difficult to follow, and a child with autism may not understand it. Laughter they might perceive as directed at them.

If you are conspicuously not keeping up with what is going on, you are likely to get teased for it, by the teacher and the class. I wonder if teachers' understanding of autism is sufficient to realise the adverse impact this has.

If you have sensory overload/high sensitivity a classroom can be very uncomfortable - noise, bright light, close proximity to others, lots of people talking (especially when there isn't a teacher in the room).

Routes within school are likely to be noisy, with a lot of jostling for space. Similarly dining room queues, changing rooms, cloak rooms, toilets, recreational breaks, gymnasium etc. They are also places where teachers may see less, and where a different child gets teased or ridiculed or bullied.

Bullying is a common experience of people on the spectrum, and equality and disability awareness doesn't seem to stop children and teenagers picking on the "different" kid when no-one in authority is looking on. School can be an utter nightmare for children on the spectrum, just on account of the teasing and bullying.

Communal toilets are one of the worst places for this kind of bullying. A lot of people on the spectrum acquire a deep seated fear of public toilets probably from school experience.

Clare Sainsbury's "Martian in the Playground - understanding the schoolchild with Asperger's Syndrome" 2000 (Lucky Duck Publishing ISBN 1 873 942 08 7) has a lot of school environment insights, including a very good section on bullying p72-100 of my 2004 reprint.

While school refusal might well be just deep seated and inexplicable, some understanding could be gained by looking into possible causal factors, if your child will disclose these things. Often teachers have no idea about this sort of thing.

While a very difficult issue to resolve, school refusal could have some identifiable causes, and if my long distant recollections of school are valid today, you might be able to explore some of this.

Classrooms are collective participation environments. If you are on the autistic spectrum you cannot hope to keep up with this. For one thing there's a sensory constraint on how much you can take in, and also some limitation in what you absorb from collective instruction (ie when the teacher addresses the whole class). You can be struggling to follow the lesson.

Under stress, such as above, you tire easily, and concentration may diminish rapidly, and even daydreaming is likely, so you are more than usually likely to have attention drawn to you for not paying attention. Also some autistic children pay attention with their ears rather than their eyes, and appear to the teacher to be looking away.

Humour in a classroom can be particularly difficult to follow, and a child with autism may not understand it. Laughter they might perceive as directed at them.

If you are conspicuously not keeping up with what is going on, you are likely to get teased for it, by the teacher and the class. I wonder if teachers' understanding of autism is sufficient to realise the adverse impact this has.

If you have sensory overload/high sensitivity a classroom can be very uncomfortable - noise, bright light, close proximity to others, lots of people talking (especially when there isn't a teacher in the room).

Routes within school are likely to be noisy, with a lot of jostling for space. Similarly dining room queues, changing rooms, cloak rooms, toilets, recreational breaks, gymnasium etc. They are also places where teachers may see less, and where a different child gets teased or ridiculed or bullied.

Bullying is a common experience of people on the spectrum, and equality and disability awareness doesn't seem to stop children and teenagers picking on the "different" kid when no-one in authority is looking on. School can be an utter nightmare for children on the spectrum, just on account of the teasing and bullying.

Communal toilets are one of the worst places for this kind of bullying. A lot of people on the spectrum acquire a deep seated fear of public toilets probably from school experience.

Clare Sainsbury's "Martian in the Playground - understanding the schoolchild with Asperger's Syndrome" 2000 (Lucky Duck Publishing ISBN 1 873 942 08 7) has a lot of school environment insights, including a very good section on bullying p72-100 of my 2004 reprint.

While school refusal might well be just deep seated and inexplicable, some understanding could be gained by looking into possible causal factors, if your child will disclose these things. Often teachers have no idea about this sort of thing.