Children with anxieties aren’t usually quivering in the corner of the playground. More often they will be the children on the periphery, watching more than taking part. They may be the model students in class, sitting quietly and doing as they’re told. They may seem absolutely fine while they’re at school with the routine and rules that have to be followed, but then they get home…..

Once they are at home and their coping masks can come off, they melt, and sometimes explode. All the stresses and trauma of the day that have been suppressed for 6 hours come bubbling up to the surface, and the inner turmoil becomes outer turmoil. The meltdown may be physical, with screams, tantrums and flailing arms and legs, it may be physiological with headaches, vomiting, stomach aches or other symptoms, or it may be a shutting down, where the child goes into themselves and needs time before they can talk to anyone, family member or not.

As a parent of a child who has physiological and shutting down meltdowns, I feel so helpless when this happens. I often don’t get told what is wrong, but it is blatantly clear that there is something very wrong. Our current stressors are homework and another pupil in the year. The pupil we can help with, giving him coping mechanisms, and talking to teachers to ask them to keep an eye on things, but there’s not much we can do about homework. His argument is that after a full day at school, he shouldn’t have to homework, and in many ways I agree. However, his lessons are full of diversity and differentiation. Science lessons have experiments that last most of the lesson, history and geography have debates and discussions so the homework is writing things up, and languages cover theory in lessons with homework often learning vocab.  If there wasn’t any homework, he wouldn’t enjoy the lessons as much as there would be more writing in class, but at the moment homework is a dark cloud that follows him everywhere, even when he’s away from school at the weekends.

He also has to ‘de-social’ when he gets back from any group situation. We were at a school bonfire night on Saturday, and he spent 2 hours hanging out with school friends and peers. He seemed to be having a really good time, but when we got home, he went straight upstairs into his room, and stayed there for about an hour.  I used to really worry when he did this, but now I know it’s just his coping mechanism, and after an hour, he came back downstairs and enjoyed a family evening of talking and films.

So, meltdowns don’t always have to happen when they child is in the stressful situation (be that school, cinema, shopping or whatever happens to be stressful), and instead they often happen at home, in the safe place where the child can do whatever they need to do to release stress, tension, anger or whatever other emotions may be building up.  When we were going through a difficult time with our eldest, a volunteer at work told me that only melting/exploding at home was, in a strange way, a compliment. It was the only place where he felt unconditional love and knew he was free of judgement, and so it was the only place where he felt safe enough to meltdown and explode.