It’s Not School Refusal. It’s School Can’t.

If your child screamed, cried, or shut down every morning before school - would you call that refusal? Because for more and more kids, it’s not about won’t go. It’s about can’t.

I live this - every single day - as a mum of three neurodivergent “school can’t” kids.

My eldest son has finally “finished” his education through the public mainstream system. And I use quotation marks very deliberately there. He completed two subjects, unscored, in Year 12 after missing the majority of Years 8, 9, and 10. On paper, he’s finished. But behind that paper is a mountain of pain, exhaustion, and trauma - for him and for me.

Now, at 18, he’s on the disability pension. He’s trying to rebuild his capacity for everyday life after being ground down for years in a system that didn’t fit. He’s not able to work. He relies on me for everything. And it breaks my heart - because this is not the life I imagined for my extremely smart, quirky, joyful little boy.

I look back on those years with such heaviness. He wasn’t thriving. He was surviving. And we – unknowingly - pushed him past his limits. We thought we were doing the right thing, following the script we were handed as kids: school is non-negotiable. Just get through it. Just show up.

And it wasn’t like the school didn’t try. They genuinely did everything they could to accommodate him, to make him feel safe, to remove pressure - and still, it wasn’t enough. Because for some kids, no matter how “flexible” a system says it is, it’s still a system that wasn’t built for them.

By the time we realised how much trauma he’d internalised, it was already deeply embedded. He was broken. And I swore I wouldn’t let that happen again.

I have two more school-aged neurodivergent kids. And when my second child started crying and begging not to go to school, I made a different choice. I let him lead. I didn’t push. I didn’t force. I trusted what I was seeing in him - even when everything in our culture told me not to.

He took nearly a year off school to heal. To rest. To feel safe again. And now, he’s thriving at a small, alternative school for disengaged teens. He goes three to four days a week - and that’s huge. That’s success. That’s something worth celebrating.

My youngest hasn’t attended school for about a year. His anxiety, especially with OCD, is so overwhelming that he physically can’t go. He wants to. He tries. But his nervous system goes into absolute shutdown. And so we wait. We love. We support. We’re hopeful he’ll join his brother’s school when he’s old enough, but there’s no pressure. We’ll be led by him, because that’s what he needs - and deserves.

Too many families are being told their child is avoidant, oppositional, “just anxious,” lazy, or misbehaving. But that’s not what’s happening. Our kids are not refusing. They are communicating - in the only way they can. And it’s on us to stop, listen, and believe them.

What people call “school refusal” is often trauma in motion. It’s a nervous system crying out for help - overwhelmed by spaces that are too loud, too bright, too rigid, too unsafe, and too unforgiving.

Let’s be clear:
A meltdown is not misbehaviour.
Avoidance is not laziness.
“School Can’t” is not a parenting failure - it’s a systems failure.

We, as parents, need to get braver. Not because we’ve got all the answers (we don’t!), but because we’re done ignoring the truth sitting right in front of us. I am now protecting my kids' mental health with everything I’ve got. Because I’ve seen what happens when we don’t.

When I had the shop, I would hear these stories every single day. Parents in tears. Kids in crisis. Families on the edge. And I’m exhausted by how often it's still dismissed as a discipline problem or a parenting flaw.

If your child can’t go to school right now, they are not failing. Maybe, just maybe, they’re finally being honest. Maybe they’re showing you what strength and survival really look like.

Let’s stop trying to fix the child.
Let’s start fixing what they’re trying to survive.

And if your family is in a season of “school can’t,” I want you to know this:

You are not alone.
You are not broken.
Your child is not too much.
They’re too important to lose to a system that won’t change.

I don’t have it all figured out, and some days still feel impossibly hard - but I’ve never been more sure that choosing my kids over the system was the right path. I’ve learned to celebrate progress in all its forms, even if it looks different to what the world expects. And through it all, I’ve found a fierce kind of peace in parenting outside the lines - one where love leads, and my kids get to grow at their own pace, in their own way. We’re not just surviving anymore. We’re slowly, beautifully, learning to thrive.

Jody x