Bart was feeling mighty blue
It’s a shame what school can do
For no reason here’s Apu
Those were the days
Sympathies for the kid. As a life long school hater, I feel his pain, whatever the cause.
I really feel sorry for your kid. He’s breaking my heart. Looks like you guys are doing every single thing possible for him and he’s agreeing to follow through with all of it and it’s probably helping but still not fixing.
I had the issues with camp myself. I went to a lot of camp with Girl Scouts - my best friends, people I knew all my life - and I just could not handle it. I went home most of the time or when I was at a camp my parents had to pay for for a week, I just freaked the fuck out a lot.
I have fond memories of camp and obviously I looked forward to going because I kept going back but there was this social anxiety that I couldn’t control that pushed me over the edge.
Thankfully I never got that bad about school. I came close to it in high school with some panic on my way in to the parking lot but I never woke up crying. Poor kid.
Well, I did go through a period of wetting myself in 1st grade, I remember that. And in 2nd grade I spent a ton of time pretending to be sick to stay home. Not sure what I did in 3rd grade but in 4th grade I became very close with a teacher, who I’m still friends with to this day.
Never did get it fixed or figured out. Never got professional treatment, and now some 20 years later I’m starting to feel it well up pretty bad again.
I wonder if I was able to do well enough from 5th grade through 4 years of college (where I did have anxiety attacks) because I was in band that whole time? Instant friends, instant activities, instant thing-to-look-forward to. Perhaps it took the edge off enough to let me get through school without the anxiety.
I also had a Security Brother most of my time in school, so that helped me I’m sure.
Sorry about your little guy…hope he finds some peace soon.
Quick update: His mom and I didn’t want him to skip today’s play date, so when he got off the bus I just matter-of-factly said we were driving over.
On the way, we talked about why he had backed out and he said he felt bad this morning and decided against the play date, wanting to just go home after school instead. “But then after some time passed and you got into the school day, you thought maybe you’d like to go after all?” That’s right, he said.
He’s there now and the other mom reports the boys are having a great time, hooting and hollering in the basement.
It’s a morning-only thing. Go figure.
(Thanks for the nice comments, ZipperJJ and you others too. I’m not expecting anonymous posters on a board to solve this for me, but it’s helpful to sort of talk it out.)
Just my 2 cents, but when I was about 11, I went through a period where I was afraid to go to school. I loved school and there wasn’t anything at the school I was afraid of.
What scared me was the idea that my parents would move away while I was at school and not tell me and I would never see them again. Seriously. When I look back on that period, I know that’s what I was afraid of. I don’t think I knew it at the time. I never went on sleepovers because I suffered from extreme homesickness.
During this period, if I went to school, I’d get sick at lunchtime and my mother would have to come and get me. Being as it was about 1959 and there was no such thing as a school counselor, my mother really didn’t do anything. She let me stay home for a while… maybe a few days and just didn’t make anything big out of it. Eventually, somehow, I went back to school, and I was okay. I always got excellent grades, and I was never bullied or molested.
BTW, I’ve always been subject to panic attacks, before that and since… but I’m glad, looking back, that this period of “school phobia” wasn’t set in concrete as part of my identity. I think the panic attacks and homesickness were/are rooted in a trauma that happened when I was a toddler.
Not saying y’all should ignore it, just suggesting it may not be anything at school. Just some huge separation anxiety. Any upheaval in the home recently (no need to answer publicly… but think about it). Any deaths in the family, even of a pet?
When my older son was in 4th grade, his teacher reported him acting out a bit. Either being disruptive or else handling criticism very poorly such as crying or wanting separate himself from the class. He wasn’t able to articulate what was going on. He’s a smart kid and was getting good grades, had friends and was very outgoing in the regular day-to-day.
I guessed that it was a mixture of physical/mental development, kids starting to realign their cliques as they got closer to middle school and the pressures of getting older starting to take a toll. I couldn’t say if I was right or not but we tried a combination of activities to help raise his self esteem (such as a community soccer league so he’d get some extra PE skills; gym wasn’t ever his forte), some extra parenting time and letting him know that acting disruptive wasn’t acceptable but if he needed to speak to the counselor he could.
I think that age can be hard without seeming so from the outside. You have friends you knew since kindergarten who still want to play with Legos and action figures and friends who think that’s totally stupid (at least in public). Ones who are starting to grow and those who aren’t. Kids who are starting to notice the other gender and try to get involved with whatever passes for dating in the 4th grade. And they’re not really equipped to handle it. Best of luck to you; I don’t know that our family “fixed” it but hopefully we smoothed the transition a little while time did the rest.
Speaking as someone who does actually have a generalized anxiety disorder, a couple of things in the thread jumped out at me. Someone mentioned getting an eventual diagnosis of Lyme disease for another child who had suddenly become allergic to going to school. When you have GAD or any of the other more specific anxiety wotzits, people assume that it’s psychological stress that triggers panic attacks, but it’s really any kind of stress that can set you a-wobble. I can always tell when I’m getting sick long before my nose starts running or my throat starts hurting, because suddenly the ‘danger! danger!’ alarms start going off almost at random. The human body has a limited number of ways to tell you something is going wrong, and as it turns out, ‘impending doom’ can feel a lot like ‘impending head cold’, only with less overall snot.
(So can ‘impending menstrual cramps’, but I don’t expect your son needs to worry about that. :D)
The other one is that it seems to be a mornings-only problem. You can put yourself under an enormous amount of stress by forcing yourself to be awake when your body thinks it ought to be asleep. My worst malfunction ever was partly caused when an overnight job suddenly turned into a super-early-mornings job, at the behest of corporate management. What happens on the weekends? Does he sleep in a lot later than he does on school days? You mention 5:30am – that would be a misery for someone who isn’t natively a morning person. My high school started at 7:20 in the morning, and I physically couldn’t do it; I skipped a lot of days, and went through a terrible ‘freak out beforehand, then fall asleep in class’ cycle when I did go.
So, basically, your kiddo might actually be fine with school, but something is going on that makes it physically hard for him to handle dragging himself there. He knows it’s not ‘right’ and you guys are worried about it, which sparks a panic attack. I also hasten to add that this is not your fault for being worried – panic attacks like to look for an excuse to happen, and if he’s having some kind of internal issues, it may not be a matter of something causing it, as his brain realizing something is wrong and flailing around for a reason for the wrongness to be going on.
You can look forward to a load of apologies from him for it, though. We do realize we’re being irrational, and that this inconveniences other people, and we feel tremendously bad about it. 
I’m glad you followed through with the play date. It sounds to me like it could well be the camp experience that has his fears ramped up.
If it were me, and my daughter, I would tell her that I think that’s what has happened, and then we would figure out tools to improve it. She was terrified of needles, and would go into full freak out mode when it came time for flu shots etc. in the end I had her write a letter to herself after each one. She would write something like. “Dear self,
It only hurt for a second. You can do this. The fear is the worst part”.
Maybe your son could write a note each day about how school went better than he feared, and then read his notes in the morning. Or it might help him to rate how scared he was, and get out a calendar and explain that the fears will decrease over time, as he pushes through them and has an ok day. Just like when you get sick, it takes a while to get all better, once you get a lot afraid it takes a while for it to go away.
Another thing that helped my daughter was teaching her diaphragmatic breathing. When she started learning to play an instrument, she would not breathe properly, and she would get lightheaded then freak out. The breathing really helps circumvent that.
Can you swap his homeroom? Or at least get the seats re-assigned? Ig it the presence of a specific person which wigs him out, it might help to remove that person.
Is he starting puberty? That would open all kinds of stresses…
If all else fails, spy on him.
If he carries a backpack, are there tiny audio transmitters which could be stitched in at the area where a strap attaches? A little more bulk would probably not be noticeable.
If the school counselor goes for this approach, arrange a recording device in her office - the range on the smallest is probably not great.
Yeah, this screams “Creep” - but at this point, you just may want to do it.
Unfortunately this is very untrue. Both of the psychiatrists I work for are part of a national campaign to call for less use of psychotropic medication used in children with behavioral issues. The OP’s son doesn’t have an intellectual disability, so that does make him less at risk for being prescribed medication to alter his behavior. The alternatives are cognitive behavior therapy (and sometimes dyadic too for some emotional problems), and talk therapy, ftr.
Rather than asking him what’s wrong, have you tried asking him what would make it easier to go to school? Sometimes rephrasing can make stuff easier to articulate, specially for a kid.
Also, I wonder if school might not be the actual problem. I know it’s a different age group, but my then-3-year-old had serious hassle going into Montessori at first. She told me she loved *being *there, she just didn’t like going in: it was the transition that freaked her out, and once she got into the habit of being freaked out, it was hard to break it. We solved it by changing the routine, to break the emotional habit: instead of going straight into school, she’d curl up on my lap outside the door while I told her a story. Then she could go in perfectly happily.
From what you say, it sounds to me like it might be something along the same lines: school isn’t the problem, it’s that transition. Camp - which was a much bigger transition and one that didn’t work out for him - could’ve made the whole idea of the shift from home to a different environment feel very scary to him.
If that’s it, then it might be worth exploring ways to break the emotional pattern he’s established around that transition. Can you drive him to school for a few days? Stop for breakfast together on the way? Anything to make the process feel less frightening?
Sam I Am, I love the idea of the letter from afterwards. I’m gonna save that one up.
One point: parents often say, “we’d know if our child was being bullied”, but often that’s not true.
Nothing wrong with that either. Talk therapy and CBT might help him out. Notice where I said that he most likely won’t be prescribed meds?
I agree. My husband was bullied at school and even his mother, who is a teacher herself, did not work it out.
An update: We took him to a psychologist and a psychiatrist who work together. The psychologist is very nice but after two sessions didn’t seem to be getting anywhere with him. The psychiatrist prescribed a low dose antidepressant for a short time.
At the last meeting with the psychologist, his mom and I both expressed some skepticism about the morning routine. We worried that he had just gotten himself in a habit, that crying and wailing was his new normal every school day and he immediately started that behavior upon waking whether he actually felt bad or not. He was doing a lot of fake crying, but only intermittently, as if he was distracted and then remembered that he had to keep up the crying routine.
I explained to the psych that I was struggling with wanting to help him if he is truly depressed or anxious, but that if he were just faking it I’d have an effective solution like taking away all his screen time until he stopped.
The psych didn’t really respond much to my dilemma, wanting to keep brainstorming for more ways to accommodate him. But apparently my son was paying attention.
The next morning he was totally fine when he woke up, even chipper. He went off to school just as he has for the past three years, with no problem whatsoever and engaging in an animated conversation in the car. The second day was the same and I expect no problems tomorrow.
My conclusion is that he is dealing with some depression issues that are legitimate and serious enough to require short term treatment. The things he has said in the evening, not before school, were sometimes heartbreaking as he talked about a sadness that he couldn’t stop no matter how much he tried. I think that triggered the school anxiety at first, and those first days were honestly upsetting to him.
But after that, it was a habit and he was being catered to in many enjoyable ways as we tried to make him feel better. He realized there might be negative consequences if he continued, so he stopped.
The overarching depression issue still needs to be watched, but at least we’re past the miserable mornings before school.
Nice update! Thanks!
Does he normally wake up at 5:30 or is that recent? Does he wake up crying or is he already awake?
Early morning is prime REM sleep time, he could be having dreams that invoke a feeling of dread. Change in sleeping habits or stress can start them up. I still get stress-related dreams that are often about school, and when you wake up from them you still have that panic and afraid feeling but often can’t say why, it can last a while. Could he be having anxiety dreams at that time? Then later in the day the feeling passes or is even hard to recall until it happens again.
I’m sympathetic. I have a 9 year old boy too who can tend towards…dramatic :). Sometimes it really is hard to tell when he needs genuine sympathy and when he needs a more firm approach. I think you are doing everything right, and I think your suspicion that he is starting a ‘habit’ could very well be true. I would keep on as you are and keep talking to his friends and teachers to make sure there’s nothing you missed.