Reflections · Individuals
Back-to-school anxiety: what actually helps
Back-to-school anxiety is one of the most common and most treatable things families bring me. The counterintuitive part is where the leverage sits: the research increasingly says the fastest way to help an anxious child is often to change what the parents do, not to talk the child out of the fear. In one randomized trial, a treatment where the child never met a therapist at all worked as well as putting the child in therapy — because it targeted the family's accommodations instead. Reassurance, rescue, and letting them skip the hard thing all soothe the moment and feed the fear. Support plus expectation is what shrinks it.
The last week of August has a particular weight to it. The light changes. The supply lists go up. And in a lot of houses in Greater Victoria right now, somebody small is getting quieter, or angrier, or suddenly has a stomach ache every evening around eight o'clock.
If that's your house, I want to say two things straight away. It's common. And it's one of the most workable things I see.
What end-of-summer anxiety actually is
Anxiety is a threat-detection system, and it isn't stupid — it's just badly calibrated for a Tuesday in September. Summer is predictable and low-stakes. School is a return to evaluation, social ranking, performance, and a schedule the child doesn't control. The nervous system reads that as threat, and it starts firing early, in advance, which is exactly what an anticipatory system is built to do.
So the anxiety usually doesn't arrive on the first day. It arrives in the last two weeks of August, and it wears disguises: a sore stomach, trouble falling asleep, clinginess, irritability, tears about something unrelated, a flat refusal to talk about school at all. Teenagers in particular rarely say "I'm anxious." They say "school is stupid" or they say nothing and close the door.
Some nerves are normal and even useful. What's worth attention is the scale of it: a child who can't sleep, who is crying daily, who is avoiding anything school-shaped, or who is talking about not going at all.
Worth naming honestly: this is landing on a generation already under strain. Statistics Canada followed the same cohort of young people over four years and found that the share rating their mental health as fair or poor more than doubled — from 12% in 2019 to 26% in 2023. Your kid isn't unusual. The load is real.
Why reassurance stops working
Here's the part most parents have never been told, and it's the single most useful idea in this article.
When your child is frightened, you do the loving thing. You reassure them. You answer the same question for the fourth time. You let them stay home from the meet-the-teacher night. You email the school so they don't have to. You sit with them until they fall asleep. Every one of those is kind, and every one of them works — for about twenty minutes.
Researchers call this family accommodation, and it is close to universal. A 2025 study in Behavior Therapy of patients aged 8 to 76 found that 100% of the children and their parents reported some form of accommodation, and 60% of parents were providing reassurance every single day (Sperling et al., 2025). This isn't a parenting failure. It's what love does when it meets fear.
The trouble is what the child's nervous system learns from it. Every rescue is a message: that thing really was dangerous, and you couldn't have handled it without me. The fear shrinks tonight and grows by next week. Anxiety runs on avoidance, and accommodation is how a loving household quietly supplies the fuel.
What the research says actually helps
The most striking finding in this area is a trial by Eli Lebowitz's group at Yale. They took 124 children aged 7 to 14 with anxiety disorders and randomly assigned them either to standard child CBT, or to a parent-only treatment called SPACE — Supportive Parenting for Anxious Childhood Emotions — in which the child never met a therapist at all. The parents were taught to reduce accommodation while increasing genuine support.
The parent-only treatment was as effective as putting the child in therapy, and it reduced family accommodation significantly more (Lebowitz et al., Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry, 2020). Read that again if you're a parent who has been waiting for a therapist to fix your kid. You have more leverage than anyone told you.
Two more findings worth knowing, both from 2025:
- Dose matters, and half-measures don't work. A meta-analysis of 86 randomized trials in Clinical Psychology Review found that CBT for youth anxiety produced strong effects when children got 9 to 16 hours of contact with a facilitator (g = −1.02) but weak ones with minimal contact (g = −0.27), and that prevention programmes needed 8 to 12 weeks to do anything at all — shorter ones had no effect (Zhou, Creswell, Košir & Reardon, 2025). A one-off assembly doesn't move anxiety. Real, sustained contact does.
- Movement is genuine treatment, not a consolation prize. An umbrella review in the Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry pooled 21 reviews, 375 randomized trials and 38,117 young people aged 5 to 18, and found a moderate effect of physical activity on anxiety (SMD = 0.39 across 55 trials). Notably, lower-intensity activity had the biggest effect on anxiety specifically (Singh et al., 2025). A daily walk to Dallas Road counts.
Accommodation vs. support — they are not the same thing
The goal is never to withdraw warmth. It's to stop doing the fear's work for it. In practice the difference looks like this:
| Accommodation (feeds it) | Support (shrinks it) |
|---|---|
| "You'll be fine, I promise" — for the fifth time | "I can see you're scared. I also know you can do hard things." |
| Letting them skip the open house | Going with them, and staying ten minutes |
| Emailing the teacher on their behalf | Sitting beside them while they write it |
| Answering the same what-if question again | "We've answered that one. What would you do if it happened?" |
| Lying with them nightly until they sleep | A short, predictable goodnight routine that shortens by degrees |
| Removing the hard thing | Shrinking the hard thing until it's doable, then doing it |
Change one accommodation at a time, tell your child in advance what you're changing and why, and expect it to get briefly worse before it gets better. That spike is the fear protesting, not evidence you've made a mistake.
What to do in the next two weeks
- Move bedtime earlier now, not on September 6th. Fifteen minutes every few nights. A tired brain has no resilience, and sleep debt looks exactly like anxiety.
- Make the unknown known. Walk or drive the route. Look at the school from the outside. Find the door they'll use. Anxiety is largely a fear of the unfamiliar, and familiarity is free.
- Let them do one hard small thing. Order their own food, phone a friend, go to the open house. Confidence is built from evidence, and evidence only comes from doing.
- Name it without magnifying it. "It makes sense you're nervous. First days are a lot." Then stop. Long anxious conversations about anxiety usually make it larger.
- Watch your own face. Kids read parents for threat cues before they read situations. If you're braced, they're braced. Your regulated nervous system is a treatment.
- Get them outside and moving daily. Gentle counts — that's what the evidence favours for anxiety.
When it's more than first-week nerves
Reach out for help if your child is refusing to go and it has lasted more than a week or two; if there are panic attacks; if they're not sleeping or eating; if the physical symptoms are daily; if they're withdrawing from friends and things they used to love; or if anxiety is shrinking their life rather than just colouring a week of it. Early help is shorter help. Waiting to see if it passes is how a two-week problem becomes a term-long one.
And if your child ever talks about not wanting to be here, take it seriously and get support the same day. The numbers at the bottom of this page are staffed around the clock.
Where to get help in Greater Victoria
Most of this list is free. That surprises people, so I'm putting it in writing.
- Your school counsellor. Free, already in the building, and knows your child's teachers. Most families skip straight past the most accessible support they have. Ask in the first week.
- Foundry Victoria — free, ages 12–24, no referral. 546 Yates Street; 250-383-3552. Drop-in counselling Monday to Friday, 9:30am–4:30pm (closed 12:30–1:30). Counselling is available for caregivers too, which many parents don't realise.
- Child & Youth Mental Health (CYMH) — free provincial service, no doctor's referral needed. You can simply phone an intake clinic. Victoria: 250-356-1123 (302–2955 Jutland Road). Saanich: 250-952-5073. West Shore: 250-391-2223. Sooke: 250-642-7748.
- Confident Parents: Thriving Kids — free, BC-wide, for parents of children aged 3–12. Short online videos plus five to eight phone coaching sessions, built on CBT, with evening and weekend appointments. A referral is required, but a teacher, school counsellor, physician or counsellor can make it. This is the closest thing in BC to the parent-focused approach the research above supports.
- BounceBack — free, ages 13+. Coach-supported skill-building by phone or online for worry, stress and low mood. 1-866-639-0522.
- Kelty Mental Health Resource Centre — free, BC-wide, no referral. Parent peer support and help navigating the system when you don't know where to start. 1-800-665-1822, keltycentre@cw.bc.ca.
- Kids Help Phone — free, 24/7. 1-800-668-6868, or text CONNECT to 686868. Worth putting in your teenager's phone now, before it's needed.
- Around the clock, for anyone: Vancouver Island Crisis Line 1-888-494-3888; call or text 9-8-8; BC Mental Health Support Line 310-6789 (no area code); HealthLink BC 8-1-1.
One correction worth making, because it's still in circulation: Anxiety Canada ceased operations in April, so its programmes are no longer running. A selection of its material has been archived at Here to Help BC.
The part I'd want you to take away
Anxiety in a child is not a sign that you've done something wrong, and it isn't a character flaw in them. It's a protective system doing its job too enthusiastically at a moment of change — and it responds, reliably, to the right kind of help.
The right kind of help is rarely more reassurance. It's a parent who can stay warm and steady while their child does something hard, and who doesn't need the child to stop being scared before they'll believe in them. Confidence isn't something you can hand a kid. It's something they build, in front of you, out of things they were afraid to do and did anyway.
If you'd like help doing that — for your child, or for the anxiety this stirs up in you — I work with individuals and couples in Victoria and online across BC, and a free 15-minute consult is a low-stakes place to start. If your own worry has been running the household for a while, why "just stop worrying" never works is the companion piece to this one.
Common questions
Is back-to-school anxiety normal?
Yes — some nerves before a big transition are normal and even useful. What's worth attention is the scale and duration: a child who can't sleep, is crying most days, has daily physical symptoms like stomach aches, is avoiding anything school-related, or is refusing to go. That's when it's worth getting support rather than waiting it out.
Why does reassuring my anxious child stop working?
Because reassurance treats the moment, not the fear. Researchers call it family accommodation, and it's nearly universal — a 2025 study found 60% of parents were giving reassurance daily. Each rescue quietly teaches the child that the situation really was dangerous and that they couldn't have coped alone, so the fear shrinks tonight and grows next week.
What is family accommodation?
It's everything a loving family does to help a child avoid or get through anxiety: repeated reassurance, letting them skip things, speaking for them, sleeping in their room, taking over tasks they find frightening. It's kind and completely understandable, and over time it maintains the anxiety rather than relieving it.
Can I help my anxious child without putting them in therapy?
Often, yes. In a randomized trial of 124 children aged 7 to 14, a parent-only treatment called SPACE — where the child never met a therapist — worked as well as child CBT and reduced family accommodation more. In BC, the free Confident Parents: Thriving Kids programme takes a similar parent-focused approach for children aged 3 to 12.
What can I do in the two weeks before school starts?
Shift bedtime earlier by fifteen minutes every few nights; make the unknown familiar by walking the route and finding the door they'll use; have them do one small hard thing themselves; name the nerves briefly without long anxious conversations about them; watch your own visible stress, since kids read parents for threat cues; and get them outside moving daily.
Does exercise actually help teenage anxiety?
Yes, and it's real treatment rather than a consolation prize. A 2025 umbrella review covering 375 randomized trials and 38,117 young people found a moderate effect of physical activity on anxiety, and lower-intensity movement had the largest effect on anxiety specifically. A daily walk counts.
Where can I get free help for my child's anxiety in Victoria, BC?
Start with your school counsellor. Foundry Victoria (546 Yates St, 250-383-3552) offers free drop-in counselling for ages 12–24 and their caregivers with no referral. Child & Youth Mental Health intake clinics are free and take self-referrals — Victoria 250-356-1123, Saanich 250-952-5073, West Shore 250-391-2223, Sooke 250-642-7748. Confident Parents: Thriving Kids and BounceBack are free BC-wide programmes.
When should I be worried enough to get professional help?
If school refusal lasts more than a week or two, if there are panic attacks, if sleeping or eating is disrupted, if physical symptoms are daily, or if your child is withdrawing from friends and activities they used to enjoy. Early help is shorter help. And if your child talks about not wanting to be here, get support the same day — call or text 9-8-8, or the Vancouver Island Crisis Line at 1-888-494-3888.
A note: This article is general information, not therapy or a substitute for it. If you're in crisis or need urgent help, please call or text 9-8-8 (Suicide Crisis Helpline) or call 9-1-1.