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Areas › Worry and anxiety › The cost of avoiding
Most stuck cases are stuck because only one half was addressed. A careful ladder of steps does very little while the afternoon at home is still the best part of the day, and rearranging rewards does very little while the child is genuinely terrified of walking in. Work out which is running, be willing to answer both, and be honest that both means more work for the adults rather than less.
So keep to the right course as you have been commanded, together with those who have turned to God with you. Do not overstep the limits (Quran 11:112). A steady course, held with others and without harshness, describes this work well.
هود
فَٱسۡتَقِمۡ كَمَآ أُمِرۡتَ وَمَن تَابَ مَعَكَ وَلَا تَطۡغَوۡاْۚ إِنَّهُۥ بِمَا تَعۡمَلُونَ بَصِيرࣱ
So keep to the right course as you have been commanded, together with those who have turned to God with you. Do not overstep the limits, for He sees everything you do
Qur’an 11:112read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
In a worksite trial with 107 distressed employees, acceptance and commitment therapy and stress inoculation training both reduced distress, with the acceptance based work aimed directly at avoidance. Two quite different routes helped, which cuts against the idea that only one approach can be correct. It fits the point here: what matters is whether the method meets whatever is actually maintaining the problem.
Flaxman PE, Bond FW. (2010). A randomised worksite comparison of acceptance and commitment therapy and stress inoculation training.. Behaviour research and therapy doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Whichever channel you leave untouched will carry on holding the behaviour by itself.
If a child is at home, run the day as though it were a school day. Same wake time, same breakfast, bag packed, work starting when lessons would have started.
Getting a child back through the gates is not the same as helping them. Ask what the school day is asking of them that they cannot face yet, and put your effort there.
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.