When Preschool Children Miss a Remarkable Amount of School It happens most often with preschool children; but when I say "most often", I don't mean that it happens often. When it does happen (rarely), it's with preschool children, usually. So what is it that we're talking about? It's a phenomenon called School Refusal. A child psychologist would be familiar with this; a general pediatrician probably wouldn't. It usually happens like this - a parent of a small child repeatedly shows up at the emergency room trying to get her child treated for some kind of ordinary ailment - a sore throat, a cough, a headache that won't go away - something or the other. The parent asks for a doctor's note so that the child can skip a day's school. If an attending physician isn't really attentive, he's going to miss how it's so many complaints by one child. Pretty soon, the doctor gets a call from the school, wondering what's going on. How can one child get sick this often - often enough to miss months of school, with sheafs of doctor's notes?
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As it turns out, in these cases the child is faking it, because he suffers from a phobia of school. Often, it's something that comes from a kind of anxiety disorder and depression. School refusal though isn't really a disease. It's a symptom of several kinds of problems. A child can have a learning disorder; there could be a psychological problem where the child just doesn't engage with the whole learning endeavor (the way some adults just don't engage with the world of the working); there could be a bully; they could have problems being social. It's just that one of the primary ways in which preschool children (or even children who