We have a rule in my house: each of my children is allowed one mental health day that they can call just about whenever they want. If they really, really don’t want to go to school — for whatever reason — they can stay home and comfortably rot for a while. If they attempt to pull that card out of the deck, I’ll make sure they really mean it. (Like the other day when my son wanted to use it for half a day: like, dude, stop and think about what a waste that would be.) But generally if they call it I’ll accept it. And one mom on TikTok, Dayne (@dayyne_gotit) elaborates on why this is a good idea better than I ever could.
“Please allow your child to miss a day of school when they don’t feel like going. You allow yourself to miss a day of work when you don’t feel like going!” she begins. “Children get stressed out and they don’t necessarily know how to explain it to you all the time, but they show you in different ways. But us as parents, we’ve got to work on our listening skills.”
Amen, Dayne. She goes on.
“If it gets to a point where your child is really emphasizing that they do not want to go to school, they may be stressed out by their teachers and their peers. Stop sending these babies over there to toughen it out. Stop telling these babies to learn how to swing back. Especially if you have one child that constantly has to defend themselves against a whole bunch of knuckleheads … So if your baby is emphasizing that, it may be a sign that they are stressed the f*ck out. So let them miss a day and tend to your baby.”
Plenty of commenters applauded this message, including no small amount of students who joked “put this on my mom’s FYP, not mine!” Parents, educators, and simply folks who remember how hard it was to be a child sometimes agreed that breaks and mental health days are important.
Of course chronic absenteeism is a real problem, not just for students missing out on learning times but for schools whose funding can be tied to attendance rates. Life is hard and sometimes kids are going to need you to be their cheerleader to let them know they can do hard things and persevere. But it’s important to set down the parental pom-poms from time to time and let them know they can rest.
