I’m university trained in mental health. Social work. Years of study on how people heal. And I still spent years being told the same thing every parent of a school-refusing kid gets told. 🔸Reward the good days. 🔸Push through the resistance. 🔸Give it time. None of it worked. My daughter missed over 100 days of school (in one year alone), and I watched “the right advice” fail her again and again. So I did what my training taught me to do when something doesn’t add up - I went looking outside the standard playbook. Not because I doubted the professionals. Because I was living something they weren’t trained to see. What I found wasn’t complicated. Her body was stuck in alarm mode, and no amount of reasoning or reward could reach a nervous system that thinks it’s under threat. Every piece of advice we’d been given assumed her brain was calm enough to listen. It wasn’t. Once I understood that, everything changed. Not overnight - but in the right order. 🔸Calm first. ...