Oh, I'm actually not in control here.
What happens when part of the breakdown in the social order happens in your own home, with your children? A story of school refusal in the pandemic age.
My boss was texting me from the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. I was feeling vaguely jealous, because I spent a semester in DC in college and spent many an afternoon at the National Gallery, and also because now, I never go anywhere.
She sent me a picture of a painting and said, “This reminds me of Evie.”
The picture was Mary Cassatt’s Little Girl in a Blue Armchair.
I laughed because I understood exactly what she meant. This little girl, painted in 1878, definitely had a big 2021 #mood about her that captures my daughter’s overall vibe.
My boss knows what my kid looks like because I work remotely from home and Evie, age 7, has been refusing school since September and is a regular fixture popping in during Zoom meetings.
If you are the parent of a neurotypical child, or if you are, like I once was, a childless adult who went through the school system and assumes that it is just a given that your theoretical child will too, then you might be saying to yourself, “Wait a minute. She can do that? She can just ‘refuse’ school? That mom has watched too many gentle parenting TikToks”.
Well, reader, school refusal is a real thing. And it has just been the capper on the shit sandwich that is parenting in a pandemic (I’m not going to write another missive on how parents are very Not Okay, but rest assured, we aren’t).
A rough couple years for cultural hegemony
Nothing like ye olde pandemic to really reveal the proverbial man behind the curtain. So many of the embedded cultural norms that many of us just took for granted have been laid bare as total shams.
A lot of jobs can be done from home. A lot of jobs are bullshit. The government actually does have the ability to just like, send everyone a check. Student loans can just be postponed and really, should just be canceled entirely. Our “best in the world” healthcare system is extremely vulnerable to collapse. Women ARE the social safety net. And don’t forget that the entire economy rests on parents being able to fucking send their kids to school, and all that implies about the undervalued and invisible and highly gendered labor of educators. &tc.
Guess what else turns out to just be a hegemonic norm that can be upended? The concept that parents are the ones in control of kids.
For the vast majority of neurotypical kids, they don’t question this norm and just follow the model that their own parents learned as children, that it’s their job to listen to what these caregivers have to say. Sure, there is a lot of developmentally-appropriate testing of boundaries and a spectrum of compliance behavior. But at the end of the day, most kids just accept their parents are authority figures.
Well, not my kid.
Evie is a very complex kid that I can’t describe fully in one newsletter. She is immensely creative, playful, and energetic. She has an ability to deliver penetrating insights about her own emotional state and others’. She is extremely caring and patient and nurturing to her younger sister. She is funny, with a razor-sharp wit, that sometimes makes me feel like I’m bantering with a fellow 40-something friend and not my 7 year old.
She also has daily meltdowns and intense sensory dysregulation. She makes extraordinary demands of us that we can’t possibly meet, and can get violent when she hears “no”. She will evade, ignore, negotiate, or fight most any demand placed on her. She has extremely high anxiety and Obsessive Compulsive Disorder that interferes with her ability to engage with the world. And she has difficulty controlling her overwhelming impulses, even when that means engaging in unsafe behavior.
Although the pandemic started when she was not yet 6, and midway through her Kindergarten year, all of this constellation of traits were present in Evie well before that. She was diagnosed at 4 with OCD, when she began having severe intrusive thoughts about contamination at pre-school. At 2, she would laugh when we tried to correct her behavior and absolutely LOSE HER SHIT at 3 and 4 when we tried to dole out gentle consequences like time outs.
She has never wanted us, as her parents, to teach her anything. She believes she knows better and best.
She had some school refusal in Kindergarten, in the Before Times. But she was little. My husband or I would just force her by picking her up kicking and screaming and putting her on the bus or leaving her at the classroom door. Once she got to school, she’d be “fine”, according to her teachers, so we figured she would acclimate. When March 2020 rolled around, things were improving a lot.
Things really escalated in the early phase of the pandemic. She would outright refuse to participate in distance learning. Like, clicking “leave meeting”, closing the ipad, running away, and turning on the TV. If I logged on for her and set the ipad near her, she would turn her back. Forget doing assignments or tasks.
Fast forward to February 2021 when her 1st grade class went back in-person. Evie’s school refusal looked like a daily battle to get her out the door and into the car (we elected not to put her on the bus for covid reasons). Then when we got to school, I’d spend 20 minutes with her hiding under the dashboard or in the trunk of the car, refusing to get out. Some days I’d have to give up and drive her home to spend the day with her sister’s nanny or with her very disgruntled parent (me). Some days I would get her to go in the door. I would get texts from her teacher every single day about Evie asking to get picked up and go home. She would say that her tummy hurt, that it felt wrong to be there, that she just wanted to go home. But we worked on strategies that she could implement with her teacher to calm herself and 3 out of 5 days, she would usually make it through the school day.
In fall of 2021 we worked with the school social worker, with her teacher, with the principal to try and set Evie up for success and prevent school refusal. She ended up going for about 10 days before she started running away from the bus stop, unbuckling from her car seat while we were driving to school and hiding in the trunk, crying and and flopping on the ground and saying “NO SCHOOL.”
She wasn’t 5 anymore. She was now 7, way too big and old to be physically picked up and forced on the bus. When we tried to get her to go in with the social worker, she ran off the school grounds and hid behind some parked cars.
Eventually, we gave up. We felt that trying to force her was traumatizing for her.
I did more research on school refusal. We spent 6 months on wait lists for a neuropsychological assessment, that could tell us if Evie had a diagnosis that would inform some treatment to help her. I called in the cavalry of my parents to travel to Minnesota for a week every month to help with childcare. We adjusted meds for her constantly. We tried play therapy for her, family therapy for us.
At the end of the day, Evie still feels the need to be in control to stay safe, driven by her extreme anxiety.
She doesn’t care when we say that she needs to be in school, or get an education, or be able to spend time with friends. She sees straight through that bullshit because she’s seen that she can stay home and be just fine. She gives herself projects throughout the day. She learns math and science from TV shows. She makes comic books and writes stories and engineers entire imaginary worlds, all entirely self-driven. If I were to suggest a project, I would be summarily dismissed.
What’s amazed and impressed me is her ability to assert her autonomy in the face of overwhelming pressure to conform to society’s norms and expectations. It’s that steadfastness that makes me feel like it’s important that I at least listen to what she is trying to tell me. How intolerable must these constrictive norms be for her to refuse to participate?
Would she have experienced total school refusal if the pandemic hadn’t laid bare that going to school was “optional”? We’ll never know. Certainly, that has had to have played a role. But for our family, it’s just another peek behind the curtain in the Emerald City. If I believe that humans can flourish without the constraints that capitalism puts on us, I have to extend that same spirit to children as well. I grieve that Evie isn’t just like me in school — a bookworm that loves school and feels at home there. But, she is being unapologetically herself. That’s something to celebrate.
If you are recognizing any of the traits I describe above in anyone in your life, you may want to read up on Pathological Demand Avoidance. This has been a very helpful lens for understanding Evie. The best resource I’ve found to date on PDA is this book.
I do not believe in parenting books because parenting a child with PDA means a total inversion of almost all parenting norms. But The Explosive Child by Dr. Ross Greene was really helpful for shifting my lens.
Oh, I'm actually not in control here.
Both my kids had school refusal of some kind, my youngest in conjunction with OCD that was diagnosed at age 14. The oldest was perhaps more like Evie and refused in Kindergarten, third and fifth grade. I was a single Mom and remember the tightrope and sick fear that I was not going to be able to make it to work (and I worked for people that liked me). The Explosive Child was a game changer for me too. I feel you, big time. (PS they are grown and still atypical but independent, functional and actually quite wonderful. Quirky, off-center but great kids).