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Just curious what you all do as far as school and separation anxiety. I know we have to send him back here soon. I just hate the tears and crying/clinging at drop off. It breaks my heart and now I know it's not his fault and that he's not just trying to get out of school or doing it for attention. It's part of this awful "THING" How many home school? or home bound/ tutor offered by the school? Do you have IEP's in place? My sons decision making is so impaired. Handwriting/math skills regressed. I don't know what to do! I am afraid he will get strep or some other illness at school and trigger this thing again. I can't put him in a bubble!!! Thanks for any input you may have! Lisa

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My son has always struggled with separation anxiety on and off, but it got REALLY bad with his sudden onset of PANDAS this summer. Soon after school started in the Fall, a friend offered to take him to school for me because drop-offs were so hard and we didn't want him to make a scene by crying and clinging to me in front of the other 3rd graders. So every day I take him to her house, he plays with her girls for a bit and then they all head to school together. It's worked like a charm. I think the key is it separates the stress of leaving me from the stress of going into school. The two together are too much.

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hi lisa. i was trying to get your story - your son is 6? first grade?

 

my son is kindergarten this year. he had extreme school phobia/separation anxiety last year. he was at school where was going 1/2 day, 5 days a week. he were fortunate in that we discovered pandas fairly early and he saw great results with a 30 days course of keflex. back in school, back to normal. unfortunately, he backslid once off that. we put him back on abx and he did improve but not to the point of making it back to school before summer break. i can't remember the numbers but he may have made it 1/2 the year total.

 

he's doing quite well now but we do have many things in place to deal with the separation anxiety and phobia. he is slowly inching his way into a full-day day. last week was a bit harry b/c he'd been out 1.5 weeks due to snow and so it's "too different" to go to school and he forgets he actually likes it.

 

i believe above all, his health has to be up to par. having said that, there are things that are either now part of him or will be part of him for the near future that we have to deal with on more of a psychological basis. it's hard to have to force him to do something like last week but i also know that it's the lesser of two evils of having him quietly reading in his room by himself for the entire school day b/c that's what he'd gladly take on one of those days.

 

i found anxietybc.com helpful with ideas. tamar chansky freeing your child from anxiety was also helpful.

 

let me know if you want to know some specifics of what we're doing.

 

good luck!

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This was a really tough one for me as my son never had separation anxiety until he got strep this fall. We were told that it didn't matter that the anxiety was medically caused - you can't "feed" it or it will just get worse. Sending him to school knowing he was going to be a wreck all day was so hard for me. Thanks to a very understanding teacher we made it through one day at a time and the crying got less each day. It took months before my son got up and went to school without telling me he was too sick to go, wasn't going to get dressed, etc. Even after that subsided he still would tell me how much he didn't want to go but would go without a battle. The separation anxiety is gone - the problem is the intense fear that this feeling will come back - that he will get the separation anxiety again.

 

Take things one small step at a time. First step for us was just to have him at school. Next step was to have him at school and be somewhat okay with it. Having him learning again and catching back up was several steps down the path.

 

We have to make sure we don't go days in a row without leaving the house to go somewhere or it becomes harder for him. Even if strep is causing the problem I feel I need to push him a bit to brave those fears - I could see my son growing up into an adult that is unable to step outside his house.

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Lisa-

 

I know how hard this is, because I have struggled with this for 2 of my kids (pandas). We made a different decision for both. Still don't know what is/was the right thing.

 

My youngest daughter, in K at the time, presented with pandas first. She had EXTREME separation anxiety. She also could not dress, eat or use the bathroom (before school). We made the choice to try as hard as possible to keep her in school. She was allowed to go late (which helped a lot sometimes), she could go in her PJs, and I would offer to come back to check on her at lunch, and take her home if she wanted. For the most part, she was able to get there every day. At school, most of the time, she did really well. I would go back at lunch, and 90% of the time, she was fine. For her it truly was the separation and the transition. Of course, during her worst week or two, she did not make it too many days- and that was okay- sometimes I would call it before we tried- did not want her to feel like she was failing. When she was healthier, this ALL went away. The decision to make her go, was because we felt it was in her best interest and her best chance of enjoying the day.

 

My older daughter is in a pandas episode now. She is out of school. She is in 4th grade. To get her to go, the last time she was there, I literally had to force her to get dressed and drag her there. She spent the entire day, pale, hunched, silent and staring into space. When she came home that afternoon (early) she was depressed for hours. We have kept her/let her stay home because we felt it was in her best interest not to be at school.

 

I think you need to figure out what will make your son happy and healthy. Going to school is always my first option, but if that seems detrimental to his health, than it needs to be rethought.

 

We used a psychologist who was very helpful with the separation anxiety.

 

Good luck

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This was a really tough one for me as my son never had separation anxiety until he got strep this fall. We were told that it didn't matter that the anxiety was medically caused - you can't "feed" it or it will just get worse. Sending him to school knowing he was going to be a wreck all day was so hard for me. Thanks to a very understanding teacher we made it through one day at a time and the crying got less each day. It took months before my son got up and went to school without telling me he was too sick to go, wasn't going to get dressed, etc. Even after that subsided he still would tell me how much he didn't want to go but would go without a battle. The separation anxiety is gone - the problem is the intense fear that this feeling will come back - that he will get the separation anxiety again.

 

Take things one small step at a time. First step for us was just to have him at school. Next step was to have him at school and be somewhat okay with it. Having him learning again and catching back up was several steps down the path.

 

We have to make sure we don't go days in a row without leaving the house to go somewhere or it becomes harder for him. Even if strep is causing the problem I feel I need to push him a bit to brave those fears - I could see my son growing up into an adult that is unable to step outside his house.

 

This is a really insightful post. If you read a lot about Panic Disorder you'll find that "the fear of the feeling of panic coming back" is a major cause of agoraphobia. It becomes a vicious circle. It's always an individual decision, but our daughter became Agoraphobic in about a week during her 2nd untreated episode. We were really afraid that she'd become homebound, and our mantra became "we do what we are afraid of". We did a ton of work with her - sometimes it felt like therapy was 24/7 - giving her the tools to deal with her intense fear. It did help her process what was happening, and continue to live life - although sometimes she was not happy about it. Abx was the salvation for us, and she now has shed all residual OCD, agoraphobia, seperation anxiety & social anxiety (maybe a 1% tiny twinge from time to time). We felt that she had to learn to get out of the house every day, even during the worst of it. We did try hard to take baby steps & to give her breaks whenever possible, but we never tied those breaks to the fear, we gave them as rewards for doing the hard thing. (So for example, if you go to school today, I'll have lunch with you as a reward. If you do the afternoon, you don't have to do afterschool, we'll go to the park instead. If you do your soccer game, then you get to sleep with mom tonight as a reward, etc).

 

We made a huge effort to get out of the house every single day, and to interact with kids every day (as she was terrified of their germs). If we even took a day or two off, it would get worse. Drove my husband crazy, as he is a hermit type, and would have been happy to stay home with her, but I knew that was not Meg, so off we went.

 

Of course, we were told that a 6 year old cannot have Panic Disorder & Agoraphobia (and food issues, sensory issues, etc, etc, etc) and that it cannot develop in a night - we later learned that it was all OCD based, and then finally PANDAS.

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Hi Lisa --

 

When the latest exacerbation hit our DS12 last spring, school became increasingly difficult for him. Mostly, he reported stomach upset many mornings to the extent that we wound up letting him stay home from school, not realizing at that point it was 99.9% anxiety. And it just kept building on itself.

 

Because his OCD behaviors were so cranked up when we began school this past fall, we knew that is existing 504 Plan wasn't going to cut it; so I tried to get a meeting in advance of the actual start of school to expand the accommodations in the 504. After hearing me describe the "latest and greatest" issues, the school psychologist actually suggested we transform the 504 to an IEP. However, while we were still trying to jump through all the hoops to get the IEP set up, he continued to deteriorate, and school became almost unbearable for him. Every morning, he begged us not to go, and then he would only be there for maybe an hour before he would go to the nurse's office and call home, begging us to come pick him up. He couldn't make it through a single class at that point (all of this was pre-abx).

 

So, we did pull him out of school for about a month and home school him. It was tough, just because school work and homework in and of itself were huge triggers for him at the time. But because he's academically pretty much at the top of his class . . . once you get past all the anxiety . . . we were able to get through a normal 6-hour school day's worth of work in about 2-3 hours. The teachers would email us his assignments, and we would dole them out as he was able to move forward with them.

 

Meanwhile, we started abx, completed the IEP process and started some intensive ERP therapy for him. The therapist worked with the school on a "re-integration" program for him, and with the IEP in place, DS12 was assigned a caseworker who helped ease him back into his "normal" school life. We started one class period at a time, sometimes taking as long as 2 weeks at each step before introducing yet another class. And we started with his easiest/best liked class first and added on from there.

 

It took about 2.5 months, but he is back in school full time and doing brilliantly. His IEP continues to give him accommodations that are very helpful to him. For instance, he gets to arrive at school and come inside a few minutes before the regular bell so that he has time to go to his locker and get organized before the halls get crazy and crowded. He gets more time to change classes so if he's a minute or two late arriving to a class, he's not marked tardy. He gets additional time for assignments if he needs it. He can take essay-type exams orally or bring them home and do them on the computer, rather than handwriting. He's doing a research project on health/fitness and swimming at least twice weekly instead of attending the school's PE class. If, at any point, he gets too overwhelmed, he can go to his caseworker and talk things out.

 

I think we've been very fortunate to have the school advocates we've found, and the abx treatment has changed his life dramatically, too. I do think becoming "school-phobic" is a real danger that we'll have to monitor should there be any future exacerbations, but it is good to have support from your school community, as well.

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