The Years My Son Refused to Go to School

Every morning from 2022 until late June 2024, I battled to get my son to school. Some days, he managed only to get to the front seat of the car— curling against the door with tears streaming down his face as I drove the half-mile to his middle school. Other mornings, he sat on the curb in front of the school’s front doors, arms wrapped tightly around his knees, unwilling, unable even, to step forward. On the worst days, I had to physically pull him from the car and frog-march him through the school doors, his hitching sobs a testimony to his mounting fear.

It wasn’t that he simply didn’t want to go; he couldn’t. The panic that seized him each morning was deeper than reluctance—it was the echo of a world forever altered by the COVID-19 pandemic.

He’d returned to school midway through 6th grade and finished elementary school subdued but without incident. But by the third week of 7th grade, faced with a new environment and a much larger student population, his school refusal unfolded as a relentless, heart-wrenching challenge. The trauma of pandemic isolation clung to him, and despite every safety net available, his anxiety remained an indomitable force.

This ordeal followed another crisis: my daughter’s three-year battle with leukemia. As a single parent juggling full-time work during her treatment, I had already navigated one hellish chapter. I believed that once the worst was over— that life would finally mend itself. Then, my son’s school refusal struck, and the ground beneath us shifted once more.

The phenomenon of school refusal isn’t unique to our home. COVID didn’t simply alter everyone’s schedules— it fundamentally changed the way children interact with the world. Social isolation, the abrupt removal of routine, and pervasive uncertainty left marks that are not easily erased. In fact, since the pandemic, chronic absenteeism has surged dramatically. The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) reported that absenteeism rates have doubled—rising from around 15% in 2018 to nearly 30% in 2021, and maintaining a plateau through 2023. For many children, returning to school now means facing an environment transformed from a nurturing place of learning into an arena of overwhelming sensory and social stimuli.

In my son’s case, our daily half-mile drive morphed into a purgatory: As we neared the school, his hands would tremble and his eyes would well up with tears. Our familiar route turned into an obstacle course of dread, and every step toward the school building sent him deeper into a panicked spiral. He begged me to let him enroll in an online school, but I was afraid of the potential for further isolation. It was clear that his refusal to attend school was not a rejection of education, but rather, a reaction to an altered world.

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Throughout this time, every well-meaning voice in my life had an opinion on how I should handle this. “This wasn’t an option when we were kids,” a friend remarked casually, as if this was simply a minor hiccup. When I asked what his parents might have done if he had resisted going to school, his answer was matter-of-fact: “Berate me. Then beat me.”

A relative, after months of listening to me fret over the phone, offered a terse, “He just has to get to school. He can’t be doing this.” Their words, meant to be practical, made me question my own abilities. I thought I had already proven a degree of strength by caring for my daughter through endless hospital visits and chemotherapy sessions. Now here I was, apparently unable to open a door and usher my son into a building.

Not to mention, our school district is well-resourced, with an array of interventions designed to catch children in crisis. I experienced this firsthand, as avenues of support for my son opened in rapid succession. A truancy professional began visiting our home each morning, armed with promises of a favorite Chick-fil-A meal if my son managed to leave the house. A therapist arranged weekly outings, mixing milkshakes with trust-building sessions. Administrators organized roundtable meetings and meticulously tracked every absence. It was all needed and much appreciated, but every discussion I sat through dropped another stone through my gut. Every class my son missed felt like a line item in the catalog of how I was failing him.

The problem was that each of these interventions, as well-meaning as they were, barely scratched the surface of my son’s struggles. Over time, the toll of our morning battles on the school’s curb extended beyond my son’s attendance. At the end of 2024, I lost my job—not directly because of his school refusal, but because of the cumulative exhaustion of missed meetings, the strain of endless interventions, and a mind perpetually on edge.

Every setback reinforced my belief that I was failing as a parent, and every failure compounded the stress our family was already enduring. In the aftermath of those stormy mornings, and in my desperation to know I wasn’t alone, I began reaching out to other parents. The responses I got indicated that school refusal, exacerbated by the pandemic, was not limited to my family, but was actually a widespread phenomenon.

It made sense, I thought, that kids were digging their heels in about jumping back into attending school post-COVID. The number of kids experiencing high rates of clinical anxiety nearly doubled during the pandemic. Still, I learned that many parents had internalized the idea that if only they could do more or be better, their children would not suffer so deeply. As these conversations unfolded, I realized the problem was larger than any one family. It was systemic— a product of a world reshaped by a health crisis that left emotional scars too deep to heal overnight.

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Amidst our own battles, I thought often about the broader landscape. In communities where tax dollars are scarce and school budgets stretched thin, the comprehensive support we took for granted might not exist at all. According to new data from the NCES, 48% of public schools in the U.S. report that they do not have adequate resources to meet their students’ mental health needs. What’s more, a child facing the same post-pandemic anxieties in such a district might encounter punitive measures rather than compassionate intervention. For many, the rise in chronic absenteeism isn’t just a statistic—it’s a daily reality of isolation and despair.

For my son, the tide began to turn slowly. By fall 2024, as he began his first year of high school, most mornings he managed to rise before dawn, sometimes at 5 a.m. I’d wake to find him reading on the couch or snuggling his cat, taking some early-morning time to himself. He’d prepare his own breakfast—toast or overnight oats—and, with a determined look, walked the short distance to school. His grades improved; our conversations have gradually shifted from panic to cautious discussions about the future, including college and careers—possibilities beyond our home and beyond the school gates. Progress has been measured in small, almost imperceptible victories.

Some mornings still held uncertainty, and our occasional rides to school were punctuated by box-breathing and fixed stares as my son geared himself up to open the car door and walk into the building. I learned to be patient on mornings when he struggled. I accepted that some days would be harder than others, and that even a single step forward was a triumph.

While my son slowly mended, my daughter’s struggle unfolded in parallel. Having spent more days in a hospital bed than in a classroom during her years in leukemia treatment, her middle school mornings started to fill with hesitation and tears. I went back to sending near-daily emails to the same team who had offered so much support to my son, alerting them when my daughter needed a gentle nudge or a “soft landing” in the counselor’s office. I woke up a half-hour early so I could drink my coffee in silence and brace myself for the inevitable struggle of coaxing her into school.

The constant question mark of our mornings wore on me. I never knew how much energy would be required, how much cheerleading I’d have to do in order to get my kids into school. On days when they both struggled, I’d come home exhausted and collapse on my couch, knowing I needed to drag myself to my desk to begin work but wanting only to stare at the ceiling in silence.

Neither of my children has missed a day of school in the last two weeks. This is an enormous win for us, though to some people, I’m sure it seems pitiful. The tension of their school refusal remains: My first conscious thoughts each morning are always steeling myself for what might be ahead. I still wake up a half hour early to drink my coffee alone, in case the morning sours and school becomes a fight. The climb out of the truancy trenches has been slow with more backslides than I can catalog, but even still, we’re moving forward.

When I think back over the wreckage of those devastating mornings, I see our story defined not by dramatic victories, but by my children’s quiet endurance. The data on school refusal and post-pandemic anxiety serve as important markers of a broader crisis, but they only capture part of the narrative. What remains are the individual moments—the trembling hands at the car door before my son swings it open and steps out onto the curb, my daughter’s soft-spoken acceptance of yet another difficult journey–their gradual, persistent steps toward healing.