Do you suspect your highly sensitive child may be struggling with anxiety about school?
Or maybe you are a teacher and have slow-to-warm-up kids in your classroom and wonder if it’s something more?
Before you continue, we thought you might like our Time for Adventure FREEBIE. This fun activity can encourage your child to step out of their comfort zone and try new things, which, in turn, can boost their self-confidence.
Why Does a Highly Sensitive Child Worry about School?
Highly sensitive children are more stressed by overstimulation at school. School may feel overwhelming due to the following:
- Transitioning to a school schedule, especially after a long and lazy summer break
- Constant noise and hubbub
- Visually overstimulation classroom
- Navigating friendships
- Academic pressure.
These emotional and sensory stimuli may tire sensitive children, and they may want to spend time alone in a quiet area to recharge their energy.
Pressure to behave a certain way may also quickly inhibit a more emotional and introverted child. That’s because they internalize criticism. Remember that these children have probably heard many times phrases like “Why are you so shy?”, “Why don’t you go play with the others?”, “when someone greets you, it’s nice to greet them back.” Hearing these words can often make every one of us think there’s something wrong with us.
Sensitive kids may also appear shy. That may be because of anxiety but not necessarily. It may simply mean the child needs extra time to familiarize themselves with the school setting.
When a sensitive child struggles at school, you may want to remind them that it’s okay to feel big emotions and allow them time to get used at their own pace.
Hidden Signs of School Anxiety
While stress about starting school is expected, you may want to look for signs of prolonged anxiety. That’s because anxiety about school can affect a highly sensitive child’s learning in different ways.
Behaviors that hide anxiety include:
- self-consciousness and embarrassment in daily interactions
- spending more time by themselves at school
- refusing to go to school and drop-off tantrums
- low frustration tolerance at home because of the effort the child puts into being on the best behavior at school
- physical reactions like unexplained tummy aches, headaches, and rapid breathing (also known as somatization)
- poor sleep, which can lead to difficulty focusing in the classroom
- test anxiety
- procrastination
- toxic perfectionism.
4 Strategies to Help a Highly Sensitive Child Who Worries About School
1. Teach Your Highly Sensitive Child to Identify Worry Signs
Help your highly sensitive child or highly sensitive student understand anxiety by discussing our natural responses to threats: flight, fight, or freeze.
Here are some examples that you can discuss:
- “How do you feel when the teacher asks a question in class?”
- “How do you feel when you are doing an activity you are not good at, like a fast-reaction game?” (Highly sensitive children have a pause-and-check approach, so they may excel at activities where they need to blurt out answers).
Ask the child how they feel in the situations above:
- Does your mind go blank? That’s a freeze reaction.
- Do you put your head down and hope the teacher won’t pick you? That’s a flight response.
Then guide them in recognizing worry signs—feeling tense, rapid heartbeats, sweating, stomach aches, or headaches—as signals from our bodies when anxiety arises.
Emphasize that some worry is normal and helpful, like the jitters before a test, that push them to focus on studying instead of TV. However, anxiety becomes a problem when:
- our body alarm (response to threats) is triggered too often
- we have big emotions and intense reactions to harmless everyday situations.
2. Teach Your Highly Sensitive Child Calming Skills
Before helping a child deal with anxiety triggers, you may want to teach them how to remain calm under stress. Children often know what to do, but when big emotions flood their brains, they can’t focus on finding solutions.
A simple strategy is to teach them breathing exercises. Here are some fun breathing exercises that you can try (pin this for future reference):
Another calming tool is mental grounding. Ask the child to name three things they can see, hear three sounds, and touch three things. This exercise helps us to remain present and put a stop to worrying thoughts.
Breathing exercises and the 3-3-3 grounding game above are great because kids can use them at home and school.
You can also try to play the Feelings Charade Game. This game works great in larger groups. Below you can find the instructions and ten printable emotions cards:
If you’d like to find more calming strategies and get a school emotion regulation plan for your child, learn more here: www.bigfeelingsjf.com.
3. Teach Problem-Solving Skills to Help Them With School
Children develop problem-solving skills early on (think of babies who learn to crawl to get to an object). However, they continue to grow and refine throughout adolescence.
In addition, the executive function, which helps us plan, organize and solve tasks, develops fully after the teenage years. So, expect young school-age children to need help with developing problem-solving skills.
Here are some simple steps that you can follow:
- Ask the child to describe the problem (“Can you tell me what’s wrong?”)
- Guide them to find solutions (“Hmm, I wonder what you can do about it. Do you have any ideas?”)
- Evaluate each potential solution and talk about the positive aspects and the risks. (“Let’s see what can happen in this scenario.”) In addition, help them exclude solutions that can hurt them or others (for instance, no physical aggression or hurtful words).
- Encourage them to make a decision, help them implement it if they ask for help, and monitor the results (“How did it go? Do you need to change anything?”). Then, try to make adjustments as needed (“What can you do next time so that your classmate doesn’t get sad when you say no?”)
4. Encourage Your Highly Sensitive Child to Share Their Worries about School
It’s easier to get children to talk about their feelings while you are doing something else. For instance, during a car ride, during dinner, or while playing a game.
Find a soothing or engaging activity, then gently encourage them to talk about school. You can start the discussion by asking them one thing they liked about their day, one that made them sad, and another that they are grateful for.
Alternatively, you can encourage them to express their feelings through art therapy. For instance, they may draw their feelings or paint something important about their day.
We’ve covered in this article four strategies that can help highly sensitive children manage their anxiety about school. While every child is unique, and some tactics work with some children and don’t work on others, it helps to try these four strategies before your child goes into a meltdown cycle.
