Chronic Absenteeism & Low School Motivation
In: Current Challenges for Teen Mental Health
How is this impacting teens and their mental health?
Since the Covid-19 pandemic, student attendance and motivation remains low resulting in higher rates of chronic absenteeism, low engagement, and poorer mental health.
Teens benefit from the structure and routines, academic engagement, social connections, and extracurricular opportunities from sports to creative outlets that schools can provide.
For students with anxiety and depression, quarantines and remote learning periods can increase their mental health symptoms and cause school avoidance, leading to a downward spiral of their mental health as well as their academic and social health.
Tips on supporting teens
Start by assessing if students’ basic needs are being met at home. Use the following questions below as a guide to assess if a student may need support at home, which may impact their attendance.
What are your responsibilities at home?
Who do you ask for help at home?
How do you get to school? Do you ever have trouble getting to school?
Do you work? How often?
What do you use to do school work at home? Is this ever an issue? Do you have access to the internet at home?
Do you have enough food to eat at home?
Is there anything that stresses you at home?
Do you need support with your housing, food, or clothing?
Start small. Create manageable and achievable attendance goals with your student. Encourage coming to school everyday, even if for a limited amount of time. When creating goals, it is beneficial to create small goals, for example a goal for two weeks, with frequent check-ins. If possible, include parents in the goal-making process.
Advocate for and with your student to help them catch up on schoolwork. For example, sit with your student and support them to write emails to teachers, help set up meetings with teachers to come up with make-up assignments, spend time completing assignments with your student, or connect your student to a peer mentor.
Connect your student to peers by asking your student to reflect on who they feel connected to in school and who they can lean on when they are feeling upset or stressed. If the student can name at least one peer, help them reach out to their friends for support and find an accountability partner for their attendance. Advocate for the student to join their friends in academic and extracurricular activities. If the student does not have peers they feel connected to at school, brainstorm how they can connect to others by engaging them in their interests through clubs or informal groups. If possible, give them alternate options for places to eat lunch or take breaks to ease them back into school.
Explore the ‘why’ of school. Many students who show school refusal and chronic absenteeism lose why school is important to them in the present moment as well as for their future. Overtime, help your student reconnect to their ‘why school is important’ through some of the tips below.
Explore their interests together and advocate for the student to pursue their interests in school through projects, extracurriculars or classes. Even one connection to an interest at school can by the ‘why’ that motivates students to return to school
Engage in topics your student cares about. You could be the reason a student will choose to show up
Talk about the future. What does their look like to them? What are they excited about and what are they worried about? Where does school fit in?
Starting the Conversation
Explore potential school-based stressors that your student may have that prevents their attendance. For example, a student may feel too behind in a class, have anxiety about a teacher, or be a victim of bullying. Use the conversation starters below for ideas on how to engage in such conversations as well as the tips above on bullying.
“How are things at school going? Is something stressing you about being here? If there is something that stresses you about school, let’s work together to figure out how we can make things less difficult.”
“What is the hardest part of the school day? How can I help you make this less difficult? I am here to support you and make school a place you feel comfortable.”
“What do you think about when you think about coming to school in the morning? How can we make coming to school less stressful?”
Find a ‘recharge’ zone for your student. Brainstorm with your student how they can get through an entire day of school. Ask the following questions below and use their answers to plan a space the student can go to to take a break from school without leaving, and ‘recharge’ to help them finish the school day.
What is the hardest part of being at school?
How can we make this less hard?
What is the easiest part of being at school?
If you could take a break during school to recharge, what would help? What kind of space would this be?
Create a check in and check out routine with your student to help track their attendance. This can range from being the first and last adult they see at school, checking in once a week about progress, or meeting for five minutes at the hardest time of the day for the student. Whenever discussing attendance, use positive language, such as the examples below, to continue to encourage students to show up.
Instead of saying “Where have you been, I haven’t seen you in class for a while” try, “It’s so nice to see you in class! I am sure your classmates will be happy to see you.”
Instead of saying, “Tony, you’ve missed an entire week of class, you will have a lot to catch up on.” try, “Tony, I’m happy you made it to class today. Why don’t you stay after class for a few minutes so I can help you catch up.”
Instead of saying, “You are late again, what’s going on?” try, “I am happy you made it to class! Why don’t you connect to a peer and see what you missed. Let me know how I can help.”
