Back-to-school season can be a particularly anxious time for neurodivergent children and their families, and getting the right support in place makes all the difference.
Emma Davies, director of children’s wellbeing organisation Health is One and chair of the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy’s Children, Young People and Families division, shares her expert guidance below.
Health is One is also the team behind The Exchange, which has provided school counselling for over 18 years, working with more than 800 primary and secondary schools across the UK and supporting over 7,000 referrals annually.
That experience on the ground in schools shapes the advice you’ll find here at NeuroPathways.
1. Listen more than you solve
When children feel unheard, they stop bringing you things. And this is the hardest one, because every instinct you have as a parent is to make it better.
Try to sit with it instead. Being fully there, putting the phone down, noticing their face and not just their words, asking questions that need more than a yes, and saying back what you heard so they know it landed. Save the advice until they ask for it.
You could say: “So it sounds like the worst bit is lunchtime, not the lessons. Have I got that right?”
Worth knowing: side by side is easier than face to face. Car journeys, dog walks and washing up get more out of a child than any sit-down chat.
2. Remind them who they are
When children feel dread about going back, they often forget everything they are good at. Six weeks away from school can shrink a child’s sense of themselves, and what is left is the memory of whatever went wrong last term.
Talk about their strengths out loud and often, and be specific about them. Then point those strengths at the year ahead, because a child who can only picture the hard bits needs help picturing the rest.
You could say: “You have always been the one who notices when someone is left out. That is going to matter this year.”
Why not try an exercise to help children recognise their strengths – the Power Bytez activity can be completed by everyone in the family. Free download: Power Bytez – Neuropathways
3. Help them find their people
When children feel like they are the only one without a friend, everything else gets harder. Friendship is usually the thing that decides whether a term is bearable or not, far more than the schoolwork.
Ask about who they sat with, who made them laugh, who they would like to know better. Then do the practical bit: get a name, get a number, invite someone over. New friendships need a parent to open the door at first.
You could say: “Who did you end up talking to today? Shall we ask them round on Saturday?”
4. Teach them what worry feels like in their body
When children feel anxious, most of them think they are ill. Racing heart, churning stomach, hot face. They do not connect it to worry, so they assume something is wrong with them.
Name it for them. Explain that this is their body getting ready, not their body breaking. Then find one or two things that help in the moment and practise them when everyone is calm, not in the middle of a Monday morning. And keep an eye on the unglamorous basics, because sleep, food and moving about do more for anxiety than most people expect.
You could say: “That fizzy feeling in your tummy is your body getting ready. It is horrible, but it is not dangerous. Shall we try breathing it out together?”
A discussion around ‘Fight, Flight, Fawn & Freeze’ can help them to understand – use the free resource: Fight, Flight, Fawn & Freeze – Neuropathways
5. Not every problem is a big problem
When children feel overwhelmed, every worry weighs the same. A lost pencil case and a fallen-out friendship arrive at the same size, and that is exhausting.
Give worries a score out of ten together. The high scorers get your time and their energy. The low scorers get sorted in two minutes and forgotten. Over time they start doing the sorting themselves, which is the real win.
You could say: “Out of ten, how big is that one? Right, a three. Let us deal with the eight first and come back to it.”
6. Give the worries somewhere to live
When children are dreading school, the worries tend to arrive at bedtime and go round and round. Telling them to stop thinking about it never works, because you cannot un-think something on request.
Get a jar and some scraps of paper. Each evening, they write down or draw whatever is bothering them and post it in. The point is that the worry is now somewhere safe and out of their head, and it does not need carrying overnight. Then pick a regular time – ten minutes on a Sunday works well – when you open the jar together and go through them. Most will have solved themselves by then, which is the bit children find genuinely surprising. The ones that have not are the ones worth your attention.
You could say: “Pop it in the jar. It’s not going anywhere, and we’ll look at it together on Sunday.”
7. Play rose, thorn, bud at teatime
When you ask a child how school was, you get “fine”. Every parent knows this. The trick is to ask a question that cannot be answered in one word.
Everyone around the table gives three things: a rose, which is something good that happened, a thorn, which is something hard, and a bud, which is something they are looking forward to. Parents play too, and parents go first. That last part matters, because a child who hears you name a thorn learns that having a hard bit is normal and sayable.
You could say: “My thorn today was a meeting that went on far too long. What was yours?”
The thorn is the one you are fishing for, but it only works because the other two are there.
8. Be the one thing that hasn’t changed
When children feel like everything is new at once, the familiar becomes precious. New building, new teacher, new bag, new rules. You are the one constant in all of it, and your relationship is what makes the rest survivable.
Listen to the worries without rushing to fix them, and resist the urge to talk them out of it. Telling a child to look on the bright side is well meant, but what they hear is that this particular worry is not worth bringing to you again.
You could say: “That does sound hard. Tell me a bit more about it.” Then stop talking. The silence is the bit that works.
9. Turn a bad morning into information
When children are dreading school, mornings become a battle, and it is easy to read that as a child being difficult.
Some children spend all day coping with an environment that does not suit how their brain works. The noise, the corridors, the unwritten social rules. They hold it together until home time, then it all comes out on you.
Instead of trying to work it out mid-argument, track it. Our free Morning Transition Tracker Workbook is a short workbook you fill in with your child, not about them. What happened, what made it harder, what helped. After a week or two the pattern shows itself, and it is rarely what you expected.
You do not need a diagnosis to ask for help. Once you can show a school the pattern, they can put support in place.
You could say: “I’m not cross about this morning. I just want to understand it. What was the hardest bit?”
Difficult mornings are information, not failure.
