When children and adolescents do not go to school: Terminology, technology, and trends
This chapter addresses the many challenging issues faced by children who struggle to attend school. First, we review history and terminology and discuss the longstanding difficulty of accurately classifying and understanding these children and families. We then summarize Christopher Kearney and his colleagues’ important school refusal framework that uses functional analysis as the key organizing rubric to understand what causes and maintains school refusal behavior. Finally, we use this framework to integrate and explore recent trends in digital technology that both provide resources and challenges as children have more opportunity to connect to educational activities but also be distracted from them. Throughout the chapter, we examine the complexities so often experienced when assessing and intervening with children and families who refuse school by using a challenging case example to illustrate key concepts.
