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Areas › Worry and anxiety › The cost of avoiding
Short absences often sort themselves out. Once a fortnight has gone, the pattern has usually begun to set, and the amount of practice needed to undo it grows with every week after that. If it has been many months, ask about something more intensive than a weekly session, because the arithmetic is unforgiving: coming back takes repeated goes at the frightening thing, and an hour on a Tuesday does not supply enough of them.
We shall be sure to guide to Our ways those who strive hard for Our cause: God is with those who do good (Quran 29:69). Asking for more help is part of striving, not an admission that you failed.
العنكبوت
وَٱلَّذِينَ جَٰهَدُواْ فِينَا لَنَهۡدِيَنَّهُمۡ سُبُلَنَاۚ وَإِنَّ ٱللَّهَ لَمَعَ ٱلۡمُحۡسِنِينَ
But We shall be sure to guide to Our ways those who strive hard for Our cause: God is with those who do good
Qur’an 29:69read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
A meta-analysis of 75 childhood anxiety trials found that treatments weighted towards exposure, meaning actually approaching the feared thing, did better than those weighted towards anxiety management. It pools trials that differ a good deal from each other, so the comparison is broad rather than precise. It is still a fair basis for asking how much real practice a proposed plan will contain.
Whiteside SPH, Sim LA, Morrow AS, Farah WH, Hilliker DR, Murad MH, Wang Z. (2020). A Meta-analysis to Guide the Enhancement of CBT for Childhood Anxiety: Exposure Over Anxiety Management.. Clinical child and family psychology review doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
The longer something has been avoided, the more practice at approaching it is needed to catch up.
Missing school is not one thing. There is pleading that folds, pleading that becomes an hour of protest, arriving late, arriving and then sitting in the nurse's room by eleven, and not arriving at all.
Physically taking a refusing child should be rare, and only with a young child, two adults at home, two staff waiting at school, and a plan for keeping everybody safe.
Where a child is not attending, the adults are often already cross with each other. That argument has to be parked before any plan will hold.