For most families, back-to-school brings some combination of excitement, nerves, new shoes, school supplies, and relief at getting back into a routine.
In our house, there is one school year we still talk about almost in a whisper: seventh grade. Think of the way people say “Voldemort” in Harry Potter.
Seventh grade was the year my child stopped being able to go to school.
Until then, school had simply been part of life. You got up. You got dressed. You complained about being tired. You went to school.
And then suddenly, my child couldn’t.
At the time, we didn’t understand what was happening. We would eventually learn the term “school refusal.” But in those first weeks and months, we were simply confused, scared, and desperate to figure out why a child who had always gone to school was suddenly terrified to walk through the doors.
Looking back, I should have known the year might be hard
The summer before seventh grade had already been difficult. My mother, my children’s Nana, died the day before school started.
Our world had been rocked by the loss, and I had hoped that getting back to school might give us some stable footing.
Instead, the school year began with absences for grieving and travel for two memorial services, one local and one out of state. Any hope of settling quickly into a routine disappeared. It was also a new school.
Add in the anxiety we had already started seeing, and in hindsight, I can see how many things were colliding at once. At the time, though, we thought we could work through it.
At first, we could make it to the parking lot
Some mornings, we could get into the car and drive to school. Then we couldn’t get any farther. My child would just refuse to get out of the car.
I kept asking my child why, but they couldn’t answer, and I could not comprehend why a kid who had always gone to school would suddenly be terrified to walk through the door.
I wish I could tell you that I immediately understood that my child wasn’t simply giving me a hard time. They were having a hard time. It did not make a lot of sense to either of us.
I did not always handle those mornings with the grace I wish I had. There was yelling. There were tears. There was frustration. There was digging in our heels on both sides. Some of my least proud mom moments came in those mornings where I was exhausted, overwhelmed, and confused about how we got here and how we find our way out of it.
I thought there had to be some combination of reasoning, encouragement, consequences, or persistence that would get us through those doors. But the reality is that this was so much bigger than that.
In time, we weren’t even making it to the school parking lot, and honestly, there were days where I just surrendered because I did not want to put either of us through another morning of fighting.
Our lives started revolving around whether school would happen that day
There were so many calls to the school.
Sometimes I called from the parking lot because that was as far as we had gotten. Other mornings I called from home because we couldn’t even make it out the door.
For a while, my child would manage to go for a day or two. But we could never string together more than a couple of days.
Then it all just stopped and days turned into weeks, and weeks turned into months.
I worked from home, so every morning became a negotiation between trying to do my job and trying to help a child who was clearly struggling.
I would call my husband with the morning’s status report.
Then each afternoon, the phone would ring. An automated call reminding me that “Your child was marked absent today.” I knew it was procedural, but every single one felt like salt in an open wound we could not figure out how to close.
The school staff tried to help. Sometimes someone would come out to the car and talk with my child. We picked up assignments and tried to keep up with schoolwork at home.
Meanwhile, we were trying everything we could think of.
We looked at homeschool programs and online options. This was before the COVID-19 pandemic, when far fewer virtual options existed. We researched special programs. We went to therapy multiple times a week. We kept the school updated on what we were doing.
And underneath all of it was another fear I didn’t talk about much at the time: What was going to happen to us if we couldn’t get our child to school? Would we be blamed? Would someone think we simply weren’t making our child attend? Could we be held responsible for all of these absences?
We were desperately trying to help our child, yet I often felt as though we were somehow failing at one of the most basic jobs of parenting: getting your kid to school.
And school wasn’t the only thing disappearing. My child withdrew from friends, activities, and much of what had seemed normal only months earlier.
Our world was getting smaller and smaller.
Five months in, we still had no real plan
The people at school were kind. They cared about my child. But kindness wasn’t the same thing as knowing what to do next.
We were almost five months into the school year, and we still did not have a path forward.
Then one of our doctors suggested that we talk with someone who worked as an advocate for families dealing with school challenges. She knew the school system. She understood what schools could provide, what questions to ask, and what requests to make. She knew the people involved. She also understood some of what our family was going through firsthand.
We reached out immediately, and after meeting with her, for the first time in months, I felt like we were no longer flying completely blind.
What she gave us first wasn’t an IEP or a tutoring plan. She gave us a sense that there were options. Options that we could use to build a plan.
For the first time, we had a way forward
The school began the process of evaluating my child for an Individualized Education Program, or IEP, because mental health was affecting their ability to access their education. But even completing the required assessments presented a problem.
My child still could not walk into their school. So the assessments were done at a different school, away from classmates and the social questions that had become another source of anxiety.
The school also arranged for a teacher to meet my child at a neutral location. They worked together at a public library.
We continued picking up assignments for other classes and paid another tutor to help us keep up with some of the remaining work.
None of this looked like a typical seventh-grade school day, but that was actually the point.
Looking back, I think this was one of the things that finally helped. We stopped expecting the next step to be a full day of school. We started figuring out what my child could manage right then.
First, an assessment somewhere that felt safer.
Then tutoring at the library.
Then, after about two months, another big step: moving that tutoring back into the school building. The school arranged for a teacher to stay after school. My child could enter directly through an outside classroom door instead of walking through crowded hallways.
To someone outside our situation, walking through a classroom door after everyone else had gone home might have seemed like an incredibly small step, but to us, it was enormous.
We learned that the small steps counted
By then, being seen by other students had become part of the anxiety. On the few days my child had attended school, classmates naturally asked questions. Where had they been? Why weren’t they at school? When were they coming back?
The questions weren’t intended to be cruel. But when you are already struggling with anxiety, simply knowing that people are wondering about you made walking back into the building feel even harder.
We couldn’t pretend the anxiety wasn’t there, so we had to work around that obstacle too.
Eventually, the IEP was put in place. Because we were already near the end of seventh grade, much of our planning focused on making eighth grade different.
There were seating accommodations. An anxiety pass allowed my child to leave class when needed. There was a specific teacher they could go to when they were overwhelmed. There was additional academic support and a class with the teacher who had already been tutoring them.
The school also allowed my child to complete end-of-year testing after other students had left. Between those scores and the work completed with tutors, my child was able to move on to eighth grade.
At the time, I could barely imagine eighth grade. High school felt impossibly far away. College wasn’t even something I allowed myself to think about.
Eighth grade taught us something else: connection mattered
We were terrified that eighth grade would become seventh grade all over again.
The beginning wasn’t perfect. But it wasn’t the same.
We found some incentives that helped. Playing a new sport became a powerful reason to be at school and in class every day.
The IEP helped too, but it’s greatest value was in helping us communicate the importance of connection, and finding connection made the biggest difference.
My child did better with teachers who made them feel seen, understood, and wanted in the room. Those teachers knew some of what had happened the year before. They participated in IEP meetings. They worked with us to figure out what helped.
They didn’t define my child by the previous year.
As eighth grade ended, our advocate helped us prepare for another transition that terrified us: high school.
Instead of waiting for a problem to happen, our advocate invited members of the high school team into our meetings. They learned what had worked, what hadn’t, and what my child needed. There was a transition plan waiting.
And four years later, I watched my child walk across the stage at high school graduation.
Today, that same child is in their final year of college.
I still get a little emotional writing that.
What I wish I had known during seventh grade
I wish I had understood sooner that school refusal wasn’t something my child was doing to us. There is a big difference between “won’t” and “can’t right now.” That distinction changed the way I saw what was happening, but it sometimes felt impossibly hard in the moment.
I also wish I had known that we didn’t have to solve the entire school year at once. For months, I was searching for the answer. How do we get our child back into school? But the path back wasn’t one giant solution. It was a series of very small steps that we never could have imagined a school would support. An assessment at a different school, tutoring at the library, coming into the building after everyone else had left, having one teacher they trusted. But together, those small adjustments gave my child a way to start moving forward.
I wish I had known sooner how much it could help to have someone who understood the school system sitting beside us. Our advocate didn’t magically solve the problem, but she helped us understand our options and ask for support we didn’t even know existed.
And perhaps most of all, I wish I had understood that seventh grade was not a prediction of the rest of my child’s life.
If this is your family right now
The path from seventh grade to college has not been straight, and it has not been easy.
There have been other hard periods, other worries, and plenty of times when we have had to adjust the plan. But when I think back to that seventh-grade year, I remember how impossible it was to imagine much beyond the next morning.
Could we get out the door?
Could we get into the car?
Could we make it into the building?
How were we ever going to get through this?
School refusal was one of the hardest things we have navigated on our family’s mental health journey. Getting through it required more than I thought we could give. It took help from many people, along with a lot of love, trust, patience, advocacy, and willingness to keep adjusting when something wasn’t working.
So if your school year has not started the way you hoped, I want you to know something.
If your child is sitting in the car but can’t walk into school, there are other kids and parents who have been there.
If you couldn’t even get your child out the door this morning, another parent understands how frightening and frustrating that can be.
If you are watching the absences pile up while wondering what on earth you are supposed to do next, you are not the first family to find yourselves here.
I can’t promise another family that their story will look like ours. I can only tell you that when we were in the middle of seventh grade, I could not imagine getting to where we are now. Most days, I couldn’t see much further than the next morning.
If you’re there now, try not to think about how this whole thing ends. It is too overwhelming. Just keep trying to figure out what might make the next step possible.
– Laurie
Laurie Hinnant is a parent who spent years navigating the professional support system for her family, and found it far more confusing, inconsistent, and exhausting than it needed to be. She founded Together We Navigate to give other parents the real-talk guidance she wished she’d had. She also holds a PhD in Community Psychology and brings 25 years of health research experience to everything she writes, but she writes here as a parent first.