I was reading about hikkikomori (which I already knew about so it doesn't count), which lead me to its whiter counterpart, school refusal. There wasn't much in the article that one couldn't already glean from Oprah-related anecdotal evidence-- children who have intense feelings of anxiety or fear with regards to going to school-- but there was one sentence that threw me for a loop: "Approximately 1 to 5% of school-aged children have school refusal, though it is most common in children aged five, six, ten and eleven."
What a weird statistic. I'm sure separation anxiety has a lot to do with the five- and six-year-olds, but the ten- and eleven-year-olds? Maybe it's a pre-pubescent thing? I don't know about you, but I remember twelve and thirteen being a lot rougher. And wouldn't it have been better to make the correlation between what's going on in a child's life and school refusal, instead of making it seem like crazy random happenstance? I mean, I'm not a statistician, or a psychologist. I'm just a concerned parent.*
* No, I'm not.
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"And wouldn't it have been better to make the correlation between what's going on in a child's life and school refusal, instead of making it seem like crazy random happenstance?"
You'd think so. But then, this is the society that turned, you know, CHILDHOOD into a "disorder spectrum" so they could over-medicate a generation of kids.
I most often hear about school refusal in the context of bullying. The child is too afraid to go to school because of constant victimization.
I didn't hear much about first grade school refusal, but I'm assuming that can be chalked up to the separation anxiety, since first grade is the first time that school is suddenly mandatory.
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