Entry: School Refusal

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.