Throughout elementary school my anxiety raged with severe Separation Anxiety Disorder, math phobia due to a learning disability, and social shyness to boot. So, to cope I became a master, or so I thought, at fooling my mother to keep me home from school. The usual complaints about headaches and stomachaches worked occasionally, and I worked hard at catching every cold and flu I could, but eventually she was on to me most of the time. When I was writing Chapter 3: Help! My Child Won’t Go to School in Overcoming School Anxiety, I remembered the following incident which occurred when I was in 3rd or 4th grade:

I woke on a school morning with the usual dread of having to leave home to be trapped all day in what I considered a tortuous jail. I could hear my parents in the kitchen talking softly and moving about getting breakfast on. I began to rubbing my hands on my head and holding my breath so I would feel warm to the touch when I called my mother in to tell her I was sick. Just thinking about school could make me cry, so I did—glassy red eyes and a stuffed nose might help my cause. In she came, felt my head and went for the thermometer, which was mercury filled in those days. She put it in my mouth and when she went out of the room, I took it out of my mouth and held it up to the light bulb of my bedside lamp because I needed between 100-101 degrees to stay home. I checked the reading—yikes, it said 106! I shook it down, uh oh, now it was below 100. Back to the light bulb, she’s coming back to my room, and then—-POP! The thermometer exploded, and little balls of mercury went flying around the room. Caught red-handed!

I can laugh at it now, but it wasn’t funny then. I was that desperate, my anxiety was sky high, and at about 7 years old I couldn’t handle the symptoms of anxiety and would do anything to stay home from school

Recently I did an initial psych evaluation on an adorable eight year old girl in 3rd grade whose mother had brought her to see me because the girl was suffering from severe Separation Anxiety Disorder. Her main symptoms were refusing to get on the school bus, crying in school for hours at a time, and sometimes running out of the classroom. Sleepovers, birthday parties and day camp also caused her anxiety to spike.

While we were drawing self-portraits, I asked her if she knew other students who had a tough time staying in school. She stopped drawing, thought, and said, “I know one girl who is in 5th grade who I ride the bus with. She told me she cried like I did when she was in third grade, but now she’s better.” My lovely articulate client even thought to question this 5th grader on how she had stopped feeling so anxious, but the older student couldn’t give her a specific answer. From there we segued to how ashamed she felt about crying in front of other students, how “different” she felt from them. I then mentioned that when I was her age, I had felt the same way she did, and in fact cried every school morning and felt sick to my stomach. That perked her up. “Really?” I nodded. For a few seconds she was lost in thought, then looked at me and said, “Is that why you do what you do? Pretty insightful—yeah!!

She was spot on. When I decided to return to school, get my graduate degree and open my private practice 18 years ago, becoming an “anxiety expert” was not on my radar. I was personally acquainted with anxiety and thought that adding to my knowledge of anxiety disorders would help my clients and me too. In fact, before I began my practice I did not realize how pervasive anxiety was, though when I thought about it, I realized that I knew very few people who were not anxious about something. Then again, maybe that was because I was born and brought up in New York City where everybody seemed wired.

But school anxiety has always been a deep interest of mine because it creates such suffering for children, stymies their natural development, and creates havoc for families. When my youngest daughter became school anxious it seemed like my life had come full circle.

That’s the reason I developed my program, wrote the book, and am becoming a blogger so I can connect with readers, disseminate more information beyond the limits of my book, and have readers post their ideas about how they help their children overcome school anxiety, or overcome their own anxiety—so we can all learn from each other.

Useful Information

Those of us who love animals and have pets know how comforting and calming these relationships can be. For decades, researchers have been studying the idea that having a dog, cat or other pet can have a positive affect on a person’s physical and mental health. For example, petting an animal lowers blood pressure and stress hormones; walking a dog or cat (it’s amazing to me that some cats do walk on leashes), or horseback riding can help you lose weight and have fun too decreasing incidents of depression and anxiety; horses are used therapeutically to help children and adults who are depressed and anxious, feel low self-worth, have school problems, are physically disabled or autistic. Even watching fish swim back and forth in their tank reduces stress and lowers blood pressure.

For more information read the excerpt and follow the links:

Children Reading to Dogs: Program Helps Readers to Improve ...

Lisa Rufle · Jun 19, 2008. Reading to dogs improves children’s reading skills., flickr. Children naturally feel comfortable around dogs. Read article.

Research - References

Affeld, Sharon. (2000). Exploratory Analysis of the Impact and Benefit Of Having A Pet in the Classroom On Children’s Anxiety (excerpts only). Read article.

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