When School Feels Too Big: Understanding School Anxiety
For many children, the doors into their school are just an entrance, somewhere they go without thought five days a week. For others, it's the edge of something enormous: a place where their stomach knots, their legs feel heavy, and the morning routine turns into a battleground of tears and pleading. If you're a parent watching your child struggle to walk through those doors, you are not alone.
What Does School Refusal Look Like?
School anxiety and school refusal aren't the same as "not wanting to go to school.” The same way you may not want to go to work, some children just don’t want to go to school. School anxiety and school refusal are more extreme. They're a persistent, often escalating pattern where anxiety about school attendance shows up in the body as much as in behavior. Symptoms such as:
Stomachaches, headaches, or nausea that appear on school mornings and vanish on weekends
Meltdowns, freezing, or bargaining before drop-off
Clinginess, tearfulness, or panic when separated from a caregiver
The root of these fears can vary - social anxiety, bullying, perfectionism, learning differences that make schoolwork feel humiliating, family stress or change, or a temperament that's simply more sensitive to unfamiliar or unpredictable environments. Often it's not one thing, but multiple factors on top of each other.
Why Talking About It Isn't Always Enough
Adults process fear through language. We can name what's wrong, describe it, reason our way through it. Children often can't. Their stress lives in their body long before it lives in words. Asking a 7-year-old "why are you scared of school?" frequently gets you a shrug, not because they're hiding something, but because they genuinely don't have the vocabulary to answer.
This is where play therapy earns its place, as a developmentally appropriate treatment method for these young children.
How Play Therapy Works
Play is a child's native language, in a sense. In a play therapy setting, a therapist uses toys, art, and imaginative play as the vocabulary through which a child can express what's happening inside them — fears they can't articulate, conflicts they can't name, a sense of danger or shame they don’t have the words for yet.
A few ways this can show in a play session:
Externalizing the fear. A child might act out a scene with toy figures where a "small animal" is scared of a "big building," giving the therapist, and eventually the child, a way to see and talk about the fear from a safer distance.
Rehearsing mastery. Repetitive play (packing a toy backpack, walking a doll to a pretend school, running through the same scenario again and again) lets a child practice tolerating the anxious moment in a low-stakes way, building an internal sense of "I can do this.”
Building the therapeutic relationship. For an anxious child, trust often has to be earned through consistent, attuned presence — and play is a nonthreatening way to build that relationship with the therapist without the pressure of direct questioning.
A Note for Parents
If you're in the middle of this, I hear you. This is exhausting, and it's not a reflection of your parenting. School anxiety is one of the more common reasons parents seek therapy for their children. If mornings have become a daily struggle, it's reasonable to loop in your child's pediatrician or school counselor as a first step.
Ready to Talk?
If school mornings have turned into a daily struggle, you don't have to figure it out on your own. Two Sparrows Counseling of Maryland offers a free 15-minute phone consultation, so you can ask questions and share what's going on with your child.
📞 Call 443-219-6880
📧 Email sarah@twosparrowscounselingofmd.com to schedule
🔗 Directly book your consult
There's no "too small" reason to reach out. Sometimes the most useful thing is just a conversation. Give me a call and we can discuss whether play therapy might be a good fit - with no pressure and no commitment.