“CBE & Catholic School Board students head back on Monday, August 31, & September 1, 2026. If the back-to-school countdown is getting stressful at your house, here’s how to tell normal nerves from anxiety that may need extra support, and when worry starts turning into school refusal.”
Late August is one of our busiest stretches for calls about children. Not because something new has gone wrong, but because the summer buffer is gone. A child who spent July perfectly happy suddenly can’t sleep. A teenager who never mentioned school starts saying their stomach hurts every morning.
Almost every child feels something this week, so the useful question isn’t “is my child nervous?” They probably are. The question is whether this is the kind of nervous that settles on its own, or the kind that needs support.
What back-to-school anxiety looks like
It rarely arrives. Children under about ten often don’t have the words for worry, so it tends to show up in the body and in behaviour instead. Common signs include:
- Worry about teachers, classmates, tests, homework, or making mistakes
- Stomachaches, headaches, nausea, or other physical symptoms before school, which often ease as the day goes on and disappear on weekends
- Trouble falling asleep the night before school, or waking early feeling unsettled
- Repeated reassurance-seeking — the same questions about what will happen at school, asked again and again
- Crying, irritability, or meltdowns over small things, often between the end of the school day and bedtime
- Increased clinginess, or worry about being away from a parent
- Worry about being embarrassed in front of peers
- In teens: flatness, withdrawal, more time alone in their room, and a shrug where there used to be an answer
The Canadian Paediatric Society notes that anxiety in children and youth often presents with physical symptoms such as muscle tension and stomachaches, and that these can interfere with school attendance or even lead to emergency room visits. So when your child says their stomach hurts, they are usually not making it up. The pain can be very real, even when anxiety is contributing to it.
School anxiety vs. school refusal
School anxiety and school refusal often look similar, but they are not necessarily the same thing. A child may feel genuinely worried about school and still be able to attend, while another child may become so distressed that getting through the school doors feels impossible.
A child experiencing school anxiety may still get to school, but it can take real effort, and a good deal of emotional support, to get them there.
School refusal is more severe. It involves difficulty attending or staying at school because of significant emotional distress. A child may refuse to get dressed, become extremely distressed at drop-off, leave school early, or miss school days repeatedly. School refusal is not simply bad behaviour, or a child being difficult. It is more often a sign that something about school — or about the child’s experience of school — has become overwhelming.
School refusal can be connected to a number of different concerns, including generalized anxiety, separation anxiety, social anxiety, bullying, learning difficulties, ADHD, depression, or perfectionism. A 2024 systematic review in Current Psychology puts school refusal at roughly 1 to 5% of school-aged children. It is more common than many parents assume, and it often responds well to treatment, particularly when parents are involved in that treatment.
What should parents do?
The longer school avoidance continues, the harder returning tends to become. It is understandable to let a child stay home to reduce their distress in the moment, but repeated avoidance can unintentionally reinforce the message that school is unsafe, or that anxiety is something they cannot manage.
At the same time, pushing a highly distressed child through the school doors without understanding why they are struggling is not usually the answer either.
The goal is to understand what is driving the anxiety, to support the child in manageable steps, and — where it would help — to work with the family and the school together on a plan for returning to regular attendance.
Normal nerves, or something more?
Three things help separate a rough transition from an anxiety problem worth treating.
Duration. For most children, the worst of it eases within the first week or two of term. That is what we typically see clinically, though every child is different. Anxiety that is still running the mornings well into late September is a different picture.
Intensity. There is a real difference between a child who is worried but goes, and a child who is in tears or panic in the driveway every morning. It helps to compare the size of the reaction with the size of the trigger.
Interference. This is the one that matters most. Is the worry costing your child sleep, friendships, activities they used to enjoy, or school days? Anxiety tends to become a clinical concern when it starts to shrink a child’s world.
The most common parenting trap
The instinct to protect an anxious child is a good one. The difficulty is that the way we usually act on it can make the anxiety stronger.
It often looks like this. Your child is frightened of the bus, so you drive them. They can’t sleep alone, so you lie down with them until they drift off. They are worried about lunch, so you promise, several times over, that you will come and get them if it goes badly. Each of these buys peace tonight, and each one quietly teaches the same lesson: that the thing really was dangerous, and that they cannot handle it without you.
Clinicians call this family accommodation. Nearly every loving parent does some of it, and it is one of the more treatable parts of childhood anxiety, because a parent can begin to change it without needing the child to cooperate first.
That is the principle behind SPACE (Supportive Parenting for Anxious Childhood Emotions), a parent-based program developed by Dr. Eli Lebowitz at the Yale Child Study Center. In a randomized trial published in 2020 in the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, children whose parents completed SPACE were about as likely to recover from their anxiety disorder as children who completed cognitive behavioural therapy themselves. We offer SPACE as an eight-session program at both of our Calgary locations. Your child does not attend the sessions. You learn to respond in a way that is both warm and confident, acknowledging the fear out loud while stepping back from the accommodations that keep feeding it. Because it works through the parent, it can be an option even when a child or teen refuses to see a therapist.
What to do this week
Move bedtime earlier, in small steps. Fifteen minutes every second or third night is easier than one difficult 9 p.m. lights-out on August 30. Sleep debt can look a great deal like anxiety in a child.
Fill in the unknowns. Walk or drive the route, find the right door, look at the class list. Anxiety tends to fill blanks with worst-case answers, so fill in the ones you can.
Name the feeling, then express confidence. “There’s nothing to worry about” tends to land as “you don’t understand,” and “I know, that sounds awful” can read as agreement that they won’t cope. Something in between usually works better: “Starting Grade 4 with a teacher you don’t know yet feels big, and it makes sense that you’re nervous. I also know you can handle a hard first day.”
Set a limit on rehearsing the worry. One good conversation about Monday helps; the eighth one that day usually doesn’t. Try giving it ten minutes after dinner, and keeping the rest of the evening for something else.
Keep drop-off short. Long goodbyes tend to make hard goodbyes harder.
When school anxiety is a sign of something else
Sometimes the picture is bigger than anxiety alone. A child who dreads school because reading is quietly very hard for them, or because they cannot hold their attention through a lesson, may need answers before they need coping strategies. Attention, learning and anxiety difficulties overlap a great deal, and getting the order right changes what actually helps.
If you are not sure what sits underneath your child’s distress, it may be worth considering:
- Psychoeducational and learning disability assessment — for reading, writing, math or processing difficulties, and for documenting school accommodations
- ADHD assessment — where attention, restlessness or disorganization are part of the picture
- Child and teen anxiety counselling — where anxiety itself is the main difficulty
- Mental health assessment — where the picture is unclear and a broader look is needed first
