After 2 months of summer, this transition isn’t always an easy one. This is especially true if you have a child who struggles with anxiety or worry. If this sounds like your family, this is the article for you. Here I’ll break down some tips and strategies that you can use with your child to help make the return to school easier for any child, but especially for children who tend to have big worries.

5 strategies to make the return to school easier for your anxious child

Child looking worried holding chalkboard that says 5 strategies to make return to school easier for your anxious child by Shannon Rolph OT

Tell the story

One of the tricky things about anxiety is that it tries very hard to get us to avoid the things that are hard and make us feel worried. This is the way that our brain is wired. This feeling, worry, shows up to protect us. The trouble is that sometimes it’s trying to protect us from things that aren’t actually dangerous (like returning to school).

To help override this tendency, it’s very helpful to help our child to reflect on all of the other times that they have felt worried and did the thing. In the midst of worry, we want to remember that it’s possible to feel scared and still take action.

Kids respond so well to stories. Can you tell stories together about other times that they were brave (remember that brave is when we feel worried and still take action). If you have an older child, you can talk about all of the other first days of school - how they were feeling and how it turned out. Talk about how they felt scared, but at the end of the day (or week, or month) actually found that school was okay - or maybe even enjoyable! If you’ve got a kindie who doesn’t yet have this experience of starting school, talk about other times that they’ve demonstrated bravery. Maybe when they learned how to ride their bike, or to swim. Maybe it was when they went to Grandma and Grandpa’s for their first sleepover away from home.

In telling these stories and reflecting on times that your child was brave, you’re helping them to draw on those other times of strength and courage.

Paint a (mental) picture - help them to anticipate what’s to come

Young girl wearing headphones and backpack smiling at school in blog post on 5 strategies to help your anxious child with returning to school by Shannon Rolph OT

Worry loves to know exactly what to expect. This can be one of the challenges with an anxious child - they want to know all of the details so they can anticipate what’s coming. In therapy, we often talk about how to build up a child’s capacity to tolerate some uncertainty. But with the first day of school there’s already a fair bit of inherent uncertainty (who will my teacher be? Will my friends be in my class? Will grade 2 be way harder than grade 1?), so instead of encouraging that flexibility, this might instead be a time to help them anticipate and plan for the things that we can anticipate and plan for on the first day of school.

You can think of this as painting a mental picture (if you have a child who enjoys art, you might even create an actual picture or story book about this). You can talk through the first day in as much detail as you can. Will we walk to school or drive? Who will drop me off? What will we do to say goodbye to each other? What about after school? Lean into your child’s need for predictability here by helping them to picture that first day.

Lean into what is predictable - morning routine

When it comes to predictability, one thing you can do to support a sense of safety and security is to lean into a morning routine. Having a clear routine sets up clear expectations about what will happen each morning, and has the added bonus of diminishing the mental load of needing to think about each step that needs to happen in order to get out the door in the morning. Research shows that having consistent routines can give a sense of control even in stressful or uncertain times.

There are many ways to establish and reinforce routines, but by far my favourite strategy for children is the use of a visual schedule. A visual schedule is exactly what it sounds like - something that you can visually reference that lays out the schedule. But there’s lots of flexibility in terms of what it looks like. You do not need to have a beautiful, pinterest-worthy visual schedule for it to be supportive and effective. If your children are readers, it can be a written list of the routine. If your children are young, it can be simply drawn figures representing the steps in your routine. If you want something pretty, I’ve created this free visual schedule for you. You can print it off and take the pieces that work for you and your family.

As you create this routine, I encourage you to do it with your children. In my house, we do this every August about a week before school begins. Beforehand, I print out the morning routine cards and pick out the ones that need to be done. Then with my children, we establish the order that they want to complete their routine - this gives them a sense of agency and control, which also increases buy-in (super helpful when implementing something new!).

Now that we’ve covered some proactive strategies, let’s talk about what to do on that very first day of school

The First Day of School

What to do and say at drop off

Let’s jump ahead to that first day of school and when you’re dropping your child off. It’s reasonable to anticipate that this will be a hard moment, so it’s helpful for you to have some strategies in your back pocket. Our tendency is often to try to soothe our child’s feelings by saying things like “I’ll miss you” and “you’ll be okay.” While there certainly is nothing inherently wrong with these loving statements, I’m going to offer that there might be another way that could be more supportive:

Affirm their emotion
Focus on the reconnection

Affirming your child’s emotion might sound like “It makes sense that you feel sad. It’s hard to say goodbye,” or “It’s okay to feel scared right now” or anything else that feels authentic to you and communicates to your child that their feeling makes sense. This is helpful because it supports your child in feeling seen and understood in their hard feelings, and as Dr. Dan Siegel points out, it is a simple and science-backed way to help calm big feelings. He calls this “name it to tame it” and you can read more about it here.

Then, instead of drawing attention to the time that you’ll be apart, focus on the reconnection. Talk about how excited you’ll be to see them at the end of the day. If you’ve made a plan for after school, talk about the things that you’ll do together. I’ve seen one suggestion (and I can’t recall where I saw this so unfortunately can’t give due credit!) to use “pocket promises” where you can write (or draw) the thing that will happen after your time apart. Maybe it’s pizza dinner. Maybe it’s a park date or reading a favourite book together. Maybe it’s a big hug and huge smile. Again, it doesn’t need to be extravagant to be helpful! What it does need to do is support your child in looking ahead rather than feeling stuck in what’s hard.

After drop off - caring for your own feelings

It’s hard to say goodbye to a child who is feeling sad or scared. It feels very vulnerable to trust that they will be well cared for, particularly on the first day of school when you don’t yet have a relationship with their teacher. It’s also okay if you feel relief that day at having them dropped off and having a chance to return to your own routine and consistency. On that first day, remember that all of your own feelings are valid, too. Give yourself the same loving kindness that you would give your child in the midst of their feelings.