Brain health · Sanctum

The school-home gap

The teacher says there are no concerns. At home you are living with someone else entirely. All day she holds it together, and the moment she is through the front door it falls apart, the meltdown, the tears, the explosion over nothing. You are not imagining it, and you have not got two different children.

Holding it together at school takes enormous effort. The rules, the noise, the social demands, the sitting still, all of it managed by a child working far harder than anyone around her can see. By home time the tank is empty, and home is the one place safe enough to let it out. The collapse is not bad behaviour. It is the cost of a whole day of holding on, finally landing somewhere it is safe to land.

This is one of the most common reasons a child is missed. The place that sees the difficulty, home, is not the place asked for evidence, school, and the gap between the two reports gets read as a contradiction, or worse, as a parenting problem. It is neither. That gap is the clearest sign there is, not a reason to doubt yourselves.

We treat the difference between home and school as evidence, not something to explain away, and we read it alongside the whole picture. None of this is a diagnosis. It is what we explore with you.

Written by Dr Asad RaffiConsultant Psychiatrist · Founder & Medical Director