So-called ‘school refusal’ must be tackled with compassion, not hard-hearted discipline | Paul Daley

hhaving been affected generation after generation by the pain of familial mental illness, perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised how terribly misunderstood and stigmatized some representations of it remain so far into the 21st century.

Most families will experience mental illness and 40% of us will suffer from it. Given this prevalence, I have been amazed and saddened by the callous tone of so many recent public discussions about children who cannot attend school because of severe social anxiety, depression, neurological diversity, or a combination of all and other unidentified factors.

“Dropping out of school” – as in most cases, although not entirely accurately, it describes the child’s inability to attend the classroom – is a real and terrible distress that Guardian Australia feels widely reported.

Australia’s newest curriculum assessment and reporting body data found that 40% of school-aged students were “chronically absent”. But experts say the severe lack of detailed research makes the phenomenon opaque at best when it comes to gaining psychological insight and policy responses.

The recent government answer of a Senate inquiry into school refusal – more accurately labeled “school can’t” to reflect the painful reality of young people unable to attend – will do little to garner desperately overdue understanding and remedies .

Only parents and families who have experienced a child unable to attend school will understand the heartbreak and grief it brings to all involved. Recent media coverage of the government’s response and a Four Corners feature again illustrates to me how little is understood – or sympathized with – by those who are not affected.

While someone was being touched by it, I listened intently. I was shocked and angered, as I know many families of those affected were, by the judgmental nature of some of the public comments. So many people responding to these stories recommend a “tough love” approach from parents.

“Just make them go away,” was the tone of so much of this ill-conceived advice. “Just put them in the car and drop them off at the school gate.”

This fundamentally misunderstands the nature of the problem.

To sit among young people affected by school cannot and their families, and to hear about theirs experiences, is absolutely heartbreaking. Every day that the child cannot attend increases their sense of worthlessness and sometimes their suicidal tendencies. It is not uncommon to hear young people say they would rather die than set foot in a classroom again, such is their fear and anxiety.

In public, it is often equated with running away from school – with “acting out”. This couldn’t be further from the truth. Sitting with a child who wants nothing more than to be able to go to class, be with a group, and leave their dark bedroom, but can’t because of an amorphous black cloud of anxiety and fear, is truly overwhelming and confusing for caregivers .

The acute sense of failure for parents is dramatically heightened by a profound lack of psychological support and by uninformed but seemingly widespread public perceptions that they simply need to “toughen up” their parenting act. Watching a child suffer the pain that comes from not being able to meet one of society’s basic expectations—what seems like the simple act of going to school—becomes almost unbearable.

Some parents have to quit work to care for children teetering on the suicidal cliff because they can’t leave their bedrooms. Families are falling apart. Marriages break up. Parents talk about their own trauma that comes from watching—every day, week, month, year—their children’s suffering and the “will-he-or-won’t-he-today?” anxiety that comes with it.

Then there are things parents do along the way when they find you just can’t get kids like that to attend school.

“I would almost physically put her in the car every day, effectively abuse her and drive her to school. She would be absolutely silent and physically shaking with fear as we approached the school. I would force her outside the school gates and drive off. Before I got home, the phone rang to say she would have to go home again,” says one parent I know well.

So much for tough love, the spiteful contradiction in terms that has no place when it comes to school, can’t, or refusal—or whatever you want to call it.

The only answer is true love born of understanding and compassion – and immense patience.

Parenting such a child is completely counterintuitive. It requires being there constantly, reassuringly, but removing any overt aspirations for or expectation of attending school, while concentrating on gradual improvements in mental health. Of course, it’s all easier said than done given human nature, the dire state of public mental health services – and the general ignorance and understanding of the school can’t.

Using the horsewhip “back in my day” of so-called “tough love” (a tragically funny misnomer that it is) on a child who can’t go to school will only make things much worse. Calling parents to show it is also a hard-hearted obstacle to a better understanding of a suffering that can only be countered with compassion and sincere love.

Paul Daly is a columnist for Guardian Australia