We need a better conversation around After School Restraint Collapse.
This is a newish term. For context, when it was happening to my child 5 years ago, there was no name for it.
He was only in pre-school, and I dreaded picking him up and having to wrestle him into his car seat mid-meltdown, or having to sit under the sun in the school playground until he was done riding all the bikes and climbing all the play equipment and refusing to go home, because I suppose that was his way of processing his day and releasing the stored up tension and stress.
At one point, I decided the kids should come home on the bus because picking them up myself had become unsustainable. And even then, I remember setting up snacks and books for them while waiting for the bus to drop them off, and with every minute that got closer, dreading their arrival and the flood of emotions that I would have to somehow, every single day, make compassionate space for (and can we pause here and acknowledge not all parents and carers are actually around for children when they get home, so then what? And not all parents have the capacity to handle a meltdown or shut-down every single day.)
The term “after-school restraint collapse” was coined by Andrea Loewen Nair, and describes the way children hold it all together during school time - trying to ‘behave’, follow directions, engage in ‘socially-appropriate’ behaviour, focus on their work, mask their feelings - and then arrive home, and presumably if their home is a safe space, let it all out. This can look like a full-on meltdown if they tend to externalize their emotions, or a shut-down if they are internalizers, or any combination of things that feel less like an everyday display of emotions, and more like an all-out collapse.
Both of my children went through this, and there was no name for what it was. But I still understood it as them having to be a very tightly-wound version of themselves at school, and then saving all the strong emotions for home.
There is no shortage of advice on how to support your school-going children with this, if they experience it. (Side note: some children won’t melt down, they will turn inwards and internalize and it will be harder to spot. They are suffering too, but just silently. We need to pay attention to them too, because in some ways these are the children who are struggling more.)
It is great that we are telling parents not to fight the meltdown, but to plan for it. I loved what KC Davis shared in this reel about how she plans for it. It is so great that we are recognizing our children’s days at school are hard, and that we need to find ways to acknowledge, empathize, and make plenty of space for that (Blimie Heller also shared about showing compassion on here).
But. Adults are like: “It’s like when you go to work and you have to do a bunch of hard things, and sit in meetings, and do some stuff you don’t want to do, and you don’t get much of a break and at the end of the day you’re exhausted and you need to wind down.”
Okay. EXCEPT. It’s children.
And school is not work. Our children are not (for the most part) choosing what sort of education or school to attend, and they are not getting paid or otherwise recompensed for it either.
AND. We are adults who have a degree of choice in pursuing a line of work, as well as decades of experience on how to manage our stress and anxiety. AND we often are unable to, AND we often resort to coping mechanisms that children don’t have access to, AND we also, in spite of all that, still suffer.
Why are we normalizing sending our children into environments that are stressful and overwhelming, that are apparently “like the workplace” for adults, except with a lot less agency and consent, and that even adults would struggle to cope with?
I think we need to look deeper at the conversation around After-school restraint collapse and notice a few things:
By giving it a name, we are helping to normalize it. And yes, to a degree, it’s so common that it is almost the norm. But the norm is not the same as okay. Sexism is the norm, but it’s not okay, or even normal (just one example of many!). Naming it means we have labelled the behaviour, and in the process it becomes about our children, not about school or our daily life.
Giving it a name also allows us to put a positive spin on it. We can now see it as “healthy”, or as a sign our children feel safe with us (because apparently we needed this in order to realise!), or even as “totally normal” and a sign our child is securely attached to us.
Why is this a thing now, and it wasn’t before? Some sources suggest it has become increasingly common since the pandemic, but perhaps it’s also that we are finally talking about it.
And most importantly: why do we insist on focusing on the behaviour and the child, rather than the wider systemic and environmental issues at play?
I am not going to say that the issue is school and purely school, because this wouldn’t be the whole truth. My children will still melt down occasionally after a very long playdate, or a day at the self-directed space, or a tiring day trip. The mechanism is very similar: they held it all together for a long while, and once home they need time to recover. To some extent, this happens to all of us. Life is not easy, and living in the society we’ve created is hard.
But based on the literature and plethora of social media posts and articles about this, it does seem to apply more specifically and intensely to school. It is, after all, called AFTER-SCHOOL restraint collapse (and there were no posts about recovering from days at home over the summer!) - so perhaps an overwhelming part of the issue is school?
The difference between a day with friends or at my kid’s self-directed centre, and a day at school, is also that their SDE centre or playdate is self-chosen, they willingly go there, they have fun, and they experience a lot of agency and freedom. All things that many children don’t get at school. On top of that, if the play date is too intense my children often come and join the adults to re-charge, read a book, have a snack; if the SDE centre is too much they are always open to accommodating my child.
School is strikingly different from this because it is usually a long day, our children do not get much quiet time or spaces to re-charge, and there is only so much accommodation a classroom of 25+ children can create for any individual child. Plus, many school-going children have after school care and/or after-school structured activities.
That said, some schools are very willing and open to create environments to support children WHILE in school - and we need to recognise and support this.
This last point, to me, feels more positive than all the talk of how we the parents need to add yet another item to the list of things we are already doing to get our families through the week. (Note: I don’t feel like putting the onus on class teachers here either. Much of the time they are doing their best (I was once an educator too, and there was only so much I could do!)).
But my final, and possibly most important point, is this: why are we sending our children to environments that they need to recover from, daily?
Why is the school environment so utterly overwhelming and stressful that some of our children experience a full-on collapse after a day spent there?
Why are these sorts of environments now “normal”, how are they the best place to learn, and why do we often have no other choice?
Why are we not making large-scale changes to create supportive spaces for all children, spaces that they don’t necessarily have to recover from on a daily basis?
Why have we created a society that we all, collectively, are regularly having to recover from - and why do we expect our children to begin doing this in childhood?!
This is not “toughening children up” for the workplace, this is varying degrees of trauma on some potentially very sensitive nervous systems - I’m thinking especially of children who are already marginalized, such as economically disadvantaged, disabled or neurodivergent children, and who are perhaps more deeply affected by environments that are not built for them.
If we even believe resilience is a thing (and that’s debatable), this is not building resilience. Building resilience, or whatever we want to call our way of adapting to the stressors of life, happens in small, incremental steps in relationship with supportive adults and peers. Much of schooling does not look like this - it looks a lot more like throwing children into an environment they are utterly incapable of managing, and withdrawing their most supportive and caring figures in the process; and then talking about how us parents need to support them when they return home from their high-stress school environment.
Here is what I deeply believe: life is not and has never been easy for children, but they deserve better. They deserve a childhood they don’t have to recover from.
They deserve a learning environment full of connection, joy, and calm, and that introduces an appropriate amount of challenge and stress for every unique child (and because all children are different, some children will be able to stretch further than others on any given day).
They deserve to actually enjoy their childhood, not perform for the benefit of adult policies and economic interests.
They deserve a less adultist narrative around the ways to “deal with" their after-school meltdowns. In other words: why are we not hearing from children on this? Why do we not take their voices seriously? Why are we not giving them at least a right to contribute to decisions about what they do all day? Do our children have insights into this that perhaps we have not discussed with them?
They deserve that we see After-school restraint collapse for what it really is: a cry for help, a form of resistance.
Something is not okay - not with our children, but with the world they are having to recover from.
Some practical things we can do that do not place the entire onus on families and children (from my perspective as a homeschooler, ex-early years educator & masters student):
Speak to school or the childcare setting about what is happening, and collaborate to find ways for your child to re-charge, to support them in tasks that feel too hard, to regular their nervous system throughout the day.
Advocate for your child: listen to them and understand how it feels for them. Ask them if there are things about their day that could be tweaked or dropped altogether. Scaffold the difficult things that cannot be dropped.
Write to your representatives, or your school board, about this issue and place the responsibility at least partially on the school environment (not on teachers, but the actual way the school day and the school environment is structured): on things like excessive testing and assessments, lack of agency and choice, homework, bullying, lack of consent, lack of quiet and safe spaces, punitive processes, competition & comparison, and more.
Explore ways to make classrooms and schools more inclusive for kids who are neurodivergent or disabled, or likely to be marginalized in other ways.
If you are an educator, take responsibility for your setting’s role in this. Instead of telling parents how to manage the symptoms of the problem, tackle the root of the issue.
If you home educate, notice if this happens in environments that are not school. It’s not always necessarily about preventing meltdowns (sometimes they happen!) but about recognizing all the elements that contribute to them happening in a regular, predictable way, and how we can make daily life something more manageable (and joyful!) for our children. Sometimes it’s about doing less, or giving our children more control over their lives; sometimes it’s about just not doing certain things, or doing them in ways that are more supportive. The beauty for us is that we can do things our own way!
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