When Aubrey Garcia’s daughter was in the third grade, she suddenly stopped attending school.
Every day, Garcia, a former teacher, would ask herself, “ ‘Is she going to go to school today? What can I do to make her want to go to school?’ It was just a constant battle.”
Garcia was dealing with an increasingly common behavioral issue — school refusal, which is also known as school avoidance or anxiety. Clinical psychologist Christopher Kearney, who directs the Child School Refusal and Anxiety Disorders Clinic at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas, defines it as “a child-motivated refusal to attend school and/or difficulty remaining in classes for an entire day.”