Her first school told us “she’s fine once she gets here.” They said all the right things about wellbeing. None of it reached my daughter. The attendance letters kept coming, but nobody ever asked why she couldn’t get through the door in the first place. In the end, we moved schools. The new one did something different: before they asked why she wasn’t in her seat, they asked what was actually happening for her before she even got there. That one shift changed everything. Two years later she walked into her first-choice university. I’m sharing the research in this post because it puts words to something it took us more than a whole terrible school year to work out ourselves: this was never a discipline problem. It was a body that didn’t feel safe yet, and a system built to manage attendance, not understand it. None of what got us there was luck. It was years of psych appointments that showed us what absolutely didn’t work, and me refusing to stop researching, going well beyon...