Definitely snatched this up because my youngest struggles with school avoidance. A helpful book with good tips and insights on what might be causing the avoidance and how to combat it. I am looking forward to implementing some of the offered solutions when the school year starts later this month.

I was very disappointed in this book. I was hopeful that this would help me, an educator, to support my kids and their families. However, this book spent most of the content blaming the schools, teachers, and staff. Having an avoidance to school is common and I wish the author had given more credit to the schools or sought out teachers and schools that have addressed it and shown reduced school avoidance.

This book is a compassionate, clear, and incredibly practical resource for any parent navigating the overwhelming challenges of school refusal. As the founder of the School Avoidance Alliance and a parent who’s walked this path herself, Demsky brings deep insight, empathy, and a strong advocacy voice to a topic that too often leaves families feeling isolated and powerless.

What makes this book truly stand out is its unique blend of professional guidance and personal experience. Demsky offers not only step-by-step strategies but also equips parents with the tools to work constructively with schools, understand their legal rights, and advocate for appropriate accommodations like IEPs or 504 plans.

The tone is supportive and empowering, never patronizing. It recognizes the emotional toll school avoidance takes on both child and parent, and it provides practical tools for navigating everything from morning meltdowns to truancy laws. Importantly, Demsky also pushes back against one-size-fits-all or punitive approaches, advocating instead for thoughtful, individualized plans rooted in the child’s readiness and mental health needs.

This book will be particularly valuable for parents of neurodivergent children or those with anxiety-related school refusal. Educators and school staff would also benefit from reading it to better understand how to support families with empathy and flexibility.

As a school psychologist in a high school I was excited to read this book hoping it could provide me with insight on how to support students experiencing school avoidance. There is some useful information here that I will take with me into my own practice, but ultimately I was really disappointed in how the author positions school as the enemy in all of this. I hope it was not the author's intention, but the message of this book also kind of blames schools for this population's difficulties. She makes the point on multiple occasions that it is not the child's fault and not the parents' fault, but then strongly suggests it is the school's fault. This hardly helps to establish a cooperative and collaborative relationship between parents and schools. I do not pretend that all teachers, school personnel, and schools do everything right all the time, but this book pretty much paints everyone associated with a school with the same brush. Maybe I am being overly sensitive because I know how hard the school in which I work strives to support its students. But even including the term "toxic teachers" frustrates me and suggests that parents tend to forget teachers are people too with their own flaws, mental health struggles, and crushing pressures to meet expectations. I do wish, however, that I lived in this author's magical fantasy world where we are not experiencing a nation-wide teacher/counselor/school psychologist shortage, that most schools/districts have social workers, that there are not long wait lists for outpatient mental health supports (especially in rural areas), that insurance will cover expenses related to therapy, and that we are not about to experience unprecedented cuts to public education (which will most definitely hurt mental health programs in schools).