School or Daycare Avoidance/Refusal Part Two

The other way in which this daycare is not particularly well suited to him is the small amount of attention he receives compared to what he's used to. The ratio of teachers to children doesn't favor individual attention. It's not the teachers' fault, and they probably suffer in this situation too. But it is definitely not what Lawrence is used to. For the first 3 1/2 years of his life, he was home with me, and obviously received lots of individual attention. Then he was in preschool, where the ratio of teachers to children allowed the teachers to focus on him frequently. Although he's not needy in terms of getting attention, he seems to need more than he's getting in daycare, or possibly he just needs to adjust his expectations.

Whew. That story turned out to be a lot longer than I expected. And you might be wondering what the heck this has to do with depression. First, I thought it might be helpful to anyone who is seeing school (or daycare) avoidance in their child and is scratching their head over it. And second, while depression and anxiety can cause school avoidance, not addressing an environment that a child who is not depressed is unhappy in may ultimately lead to their suffering from depression.

I know of what I speak, not as a parent, but as a child. Depression doesn't run in my family - neither side seems to have a hint of anyone with mental illness. Yet, starting at around seven or eight, I battled undiagnosed depression for twenty years. I was generally happy at home, but I dreaded school. 

What changed? Well, for one thing, we moved from a middle class town in New Jersey to a rich, preppy town in Connecticut. Darien, our new home, was like many moneyed towns in that a huge emphasis was placed on sports. You were defined to a great extent by how you performed in sports. I, as you might guess, was not strong in the athletics area. I was a voracious reader, which didn't lend itself to a lot of extracurricular time spent on sports, and I was (still am) not terribly well coordinated. Also, having Attention Deficit Disorder meant that my attention generally wandered while the Physical Education teacher was explaining how to play a game, which inevitably led to screwing up during the game. You know that kid who was always picked last for the team? Yup, that was me.

Unfortunately, in the 1970s no one, even the medical community, realized that a child could suffer from depression. It was obvious to my parents that I didn't have many friends, and they told me subsequent to my depression diagnosis that they realized that something was wrong with me, but it never occurred to them that it was depression.

Now, I don't mean to suggest that every child who is dealing with a less than optimal environment at school or daycare is likely to get clinically depressed. My emotional resilience had suffered some blows before we moved to Darien, both from my parents' divorce, my stepfather's deployment to Vietnam and multiple moves before this one.