Children in modern society are burdened with excessive physical and psychological stress. The huge amount of information that they are forced to absorb daily, early development, and the high demands of the educational program lead to the fact that their psyche cannot withstand constant stress and overload. Which leads to the development of neuroses and neurophobic disorders. Didaskaleinophobia is a typical disease among schoolchildren. What kind of phobia is this? What are the reasons for its development, and how to deal with it?
Causes of didaskaleinophobia
Fear of school rarely develops due to psychological trauma alone. More often the influence is exerted by chronic stress, systematic exposure to one or more negative factors.
What are the negative factors (prerequisites for fear of going to school):
- bullying by classmates (bullying);
- conflicts with teachers;
- frequent conflicts with classmates;
- the position of an outcast;
- increased physical and intellectual stress;
- the severity and pressure of teachers;
- severity and punishment from parents (due to problems at school);
- other discomfort within the walls of the school or on the way to it (cold, poor nutrition, a section of the road with angry dogs, etc.).
Non-standard reasons include fear for loved ones, which is more common in dysfunctional families. The child worries that while he is at school, something bad will happen to family members or pets at home.
It is important! Didaskaleinophobia may hide other school fears, such as fear of assessment or fear of public speaking. Or fear of communication, social interaction. Sometimes the parents' fears about school are passed on to the student.
How to cope with didaskaleinophobia
A child cannot always fully explain the reasons for his fear of school. In most cases, he himself does not understand the source of his fears well. Therefore, you cannot do without the help of a qualified specialist.
In regular conversations, a child psychologist will help the student understand exactly what factors gave rise to didaskaleinophobia. He will explain how you can cope with peer attacks, psychological pressure and other things that a teenager faces.
A psychologist will help you form the right attitude towards everything that happens. If the cause of the phobia is fear for the health and well-being of the parents, then the child specialist will teach several techniques, using which the student will learn to feel comfortable outside the home, without parental supervision.
Along with psychological therapy, in some cases, mild antidepressants, exercise therapy or other physiotherapeutic measures are prescribed.
Manifestation of fear of school
You can notice psychosomatic manifestations of phobia:
- feeling of suffocation;
- breathing problems;
- tachycardia and arrhythmia;
- increased sweating;
- shiver;
- dizziness and headache;
- weakness in the legs;
- muscle pain and tension;
- chest pain;
- fainting;
- dyspepsia;
- numbness or hyperactivity (during the attack);
- attention disorder and other cognitive impairment;
- inappropriate reactions (crying or screaming, aggression);
- nervousness, chaotic movements of the hands or nervous walking from side to side, swaying.
The main psychological symptom is fear of a recurrence of the attack. The older the child is and the more often the attacks occur, the greater the fear of going crazy, being embarrassed, or being ridiculed.
General information
Didaskaleinophobia is a fear that affects the school period. The literal translation is “fear of school.” Parents are not always able to detect this deviation in their child in time. Often mothers and fathers perceive the child’s reluctance to get ready for school as capriciousness or laziness. Ignoring this condition is a serious omission on the part of adults. You need to understand that the psyche of children is still in the process of formation, it is plastic. In the presence of prolonged influence of negative factors, it can be crippled. In addition, the baby’s nervous system “wears out” much faster, therefore making him susceptible to the development of asthenia, depression and other secondary pathologies.
This phobia can develop as early as the first grade. At first, difficulties appear in adapting to the new team, moodiness, and inability to join the educational process. After a while, the child begins to protest against going to school and even refuses to do homework. This is not yet an indicator of the presence of a phobia, but it is already the first alarm bell, indicating an acute stressful period in the life of a student and the need for emergency support from parents. This is precisely the period when you need to do everything possible to prevent the development of a strong fear of school.
How to get rid of, stop being afraid of school
Children cannot always name the exact reason for their fear. The younger the child, the more difficult it is for him to express his feelings. Therefore, for diagnosis and treatment, it is recommended to consult a psychologist.
Help from a psychologist
During conversations, the psychologist finds out the causes of fear, draws up a correction plan, helps the child change his attitude towards problems and develop a new behavior strategy. The treatment of children uses art therapy, cognitive behavioral psychotherapy and parental assistance.
Art therapy
Art therapy helps both to find out the cause of the phobia and to get rid of fear. It is better to entrust the diagnosis to a psychologist. Only a specialist will be able to correctly interpret a student’s free drawing. But you can treat fear yourself. To do this, you need to invite the student to depict his fear of school. Then offer to make fun of the fear. You can add bright colors and fun elements. Or you can draw heroes (the child himself) who overcomes his fear of school.
It is important! Art therapy methods (drawing, modeling, singing, dancing, theater) are recommended to be used when working with children of primary school age. When working with adolescents, it is better to use conversation and cognitive behavioral psychotherapy.
Cognitive behavioral therapy
Cognitive behavioral psychotherapy helps to find negative attitudes and change attitudes towards them. The psychologist asks the student a number of questions:
- What happens if you go to school?
- Why are you afraid of your classmates?
- What happens if you are poorly prepared for lessons?
- What happens if you get a bad grade?
- Who told you, or why did you decide, that school is a dangerous place?
- Why are you worried about your parents while you are at school?
Cognitive-behavioral psychotherapy involves individual sessions (conversations) with a psychologist and homework, which are then also discussed during the sessions.
Examples of homework:
- meet two peers this week;
- prepare for lessons independently and get five points;
- do something to earn the respect of classmates;
- take part in a school event;
- Create a positive morning ritual with your parents.
Tasks should not be a burden; the student should perceive them as a game. You cannot force a young client, you need to interest him.
Parental help
In a calm tone, without coercion, try to find out what exactly frightens and worries the child. Take an interest in your child's relationships with peers and teachers. You cannot make fun of a child’s fears; you need to take them seriously and discuss it with your child.
What else should parents do:
- Tell your child about the benefits of school and the importance of education. Remember your school years, tell us about how you had fun with your peers, what subject you liked. But don’t forget to talk about the difficulties and your experience of overcoming them. Say that you are always ready to help.
- Take an interest in your child's progress every day. Moreover, talk not only about academic performance, but also about relationships within the school walls.
- Answer all your child’s questions and always give him your attention.
Child's learning problems: difficulties with reading and writing. Dyslexia and dysgraphia
The cause of difficulties in learning to write and read may lie in different areas. During the examination, it is possible to detect hearing impairment (it is difficult for the child to associate a letter with a sound), difficulty understanding visual information, fatigue, decreased ability to concentrate, increased level of anxiety, increased intracranial pressure, etc. Therefore, the way to solve the problem of dyslexia and dysgraphia is individual in each case. And the correction of dyslexia and dysgraphia begins with finding out their root cause. If the problem lies in the area of neuropsychological reasons, then after conducting research and tests, we will select the most effective approaches for teaching the child. If the roots of the violations lie in the medical field, we will recommend treatment that is appropriate for the given situation.
For each person, the speech function is provided by several parts of the brain, and correct speech is the result of the simultaneous, correct and joint work of these parts. Connections between different parts of the brain develop in a child from the moment of birth, and most actively in the first months of life.
As the child develops motor skills, others appear: the child follows with his eyes, holds his head, then begins to crawl, babble, pronounce some sounds, letters, works more and more dexterously with his hands, and develops walking skills. And all these skills lead to the formation of connections within the hemispheres between different fields of the cerebral cortex and connections between the right and left hemispheres of the brain. And on these simple connections lie more and more complex ones. Thus, in the end, speech is formed.
Dyslexia is most often associated with uncoordinated or deficient connections between the parts of the brain that support speech and the ability to recognize and remember symbols and sounds.
For example, a child had early developmental disorders and one of the variants of crawling, say, on the belly, was not formed. Or the child did not crawl on all fours, but immediately walked. Accordingly, the connections in the brain have formed with some deficit; the child lacks connections between the occipital parts of the brain, which provide the perception of visual information, and the frontal parts, which form speech as such. At the same time, the child does not associate the visual image of the letter with its meaning and sound.
Or another common example: a child should be right-handed, but due to hypoxic brain damage, speech is transmitted to the left and right hemispheres of the brain. The child turned out to be ambidextrous (right-handed and left-handed at the same time). To form speech and writing, a child has to “distill” information between the hemispheres of the brain, and this is distant, difficult and tiring. Impaired speech, writing, memorization, and understanding of number formats may occur.
A typical example with a high level of anxiety. A child “stuck” in a stress reaction of any kind is physically unable to fully assimilate information. Therefore, childhood neuroses, fears, and prolonged nervous tension do not allow speech to form correctly.
Very often, dyslexia and speech disorders in a child can be associated with increased excitability. That is, the child is so emotionally excitable that he has difficulty concentrating and, accordingly, does not remember and understand letter or number formats well, which is why speech is not formed normally.
Test for the presence of dyslexia in a child:
- Complains of a headache after reading due to extreme stress
- Often rubs eyes, may squint
- Has difficulty recognizing, remembering and reproducing basic geometric shapes
- Can hold a book very close to the eyes or cover one eye while reading
- Turns his head when reading so as not to see the text with one eye
- Gets tired quite quickly from reading or writing
- Avoids these very activities
- Skips letters and whole words when reading
- At the beginning of learning to spell, he can write words backwards
- Reading is very difficult for a child
- Has bad handwriting, words “jump” and overlap each other
Where to begin ? First of all, we recommend contacting a child psychologist or neuropsychologist who will conduct several tests. First level tests are:
- Psychological examination of a child’s reading and writing skills, hearing and level of speech development.
- The level and characteristics of cognitive abilities, such as intelligence, attention, memory, imagination.
- Tests for right- and left-handedness, features of early development, phonemic hearing.
Gradually, all the capabilities and abilities of the child are revealed, on the basis of which we will offer a form of education that is suitable for him. For example, a child is kinesthetic (better perceives information through joint-muscular and tactile sensations) and it is difficult for him to learn, focusing only on hearing or looking at the text in a textbook. And you just have to change the learning style to one that is convenient for your child, you can achieve amazing results in a fairly short period of time.
If it is appropriate, the psychologist will involve a pediatric neurologist or neuropsychiatrist to check the child's neurological status, to find or rule out neurological disorders and any diseases that may be the cause of the problems.
A concomitant examination of the child’s hearing and vision will not be superfluous. If a child hears sounds poorly, then, accordingly, he speaks poorly. If he sees letters poorly, he remembers them poorly. Vision and hearing can be checked by an ENT doctor and an ophthalmologist. For example, dyslexia may be caused by hearing problems caused by enlarged adenoids.
Preventing fear of school
Prevention should begin in preschool age. Before sending your child to school, you need to make sure that he is ready to learn. There is such a thing as a child’s psychological readiness for school. It consists of morphophysiological, subject and psychological readiness. Psychological readiness presupposes intellectual and personal readiness, voluntary regulation of behavior and activity. Personal readiness includes emotional, motivational and communicative readiness, and also takes into account the formation of self-concept and self-esteem. All this is diagnosed by a psychologist; there are special tests and methods to determine a child’s readiness for school.
The second important element of prevention is a favorable psychological climate in the family. It is important that parents support the child. It is unacceptable for a family to have conflicts, scandals, or quarrels. Try to put yourself in the child’s position, listen to his opinion, do not yell at him or criticize him.
It is important! School adaptation and socialization depend on the child’s psychological readiness for school. An unprepared child suffers from maladaptation and often suffers from didaskaleinophobia.
Low self-esteem in a child
We recommend correcting self-esteem problems in childhood or adolescence, before low self-esteem takes hold and “takes root” in all areas of a person’s life. In most cases, the problem is completely solvable.
As you know, any person needs external assessment. It can be either positive - admiration, pride for success, love, respect, or negative - reproaches, contempt, accusations of failure, rudeness, indifference. Basically, your own internal assessment is based on the external assessment, as a result of the analysis of several opinions. In the case of a small person, the problem of low self-esteem, once arising and continuing unhindered, can significantly affect psychological development, leaving a negative imprint on the personality as such. Elimination of psychological problems, complexes, phobias, individual negative aspects of behavior - originating at an early age - in an adult is a more difficult and lengthy process if they were not diagnosed and eliminated in childhood.
Children with low self-esteem tend to be shy when communicating and speak in a quiet, hesitant voice. Low self-esteem in a child is formed, as a rule, under the influence of the social environment. Family, circle of friends in the yard, kindergarten or school. Moreover, this formation of self-esteem can occur under the influence of just one person, if this person - the only one from the entire social circle - somehow had a dominant influence on the formation of self-esteem in the child. For example: in a large family, an aggressively dominant grandmother can create low self-esteem in a child who is adored and idolized by his parents. Or an inadequate kindergarten teacher can significantly undermine the self-esteem of a child who is loved and respected by everyone in the family. Or a neighbor, passing by a child at an unfortunate psychological moment, might say something unpleasant and thus affect the child’s self-esteem. Most children are not ready or have no desire to share their experiences with anyone. The child is left alone with problems, with a reassessment of his thoughts and actions, and in this case his self-analysis is distorted by the opinions of others. The consequences of such introspection over time can be unpredictable.
Self-esteem may decrease for a short time, for example, as a result of negative opinion from others. It is also important who expresses the opinion. Of course, a child’s long-term, systemic, low self-esteem is influenced mainly by people with whom he has long-term connections. From the kindergarten teacher to family members, including children (older or even younger), not just adults. Long-term emotional connections create authorities that are taken into account by the child in self-esteem.
