The stomach ache arrives on Sunday evening. On Monday, at the school gate, the negotiation starts. By Wednesday one of you has said something you did not mean and the other has given in “just for today”.
None of that proves the child is putting it on, and none of it, on its own, is a diagnosis. It might be anxiety. It might be something happening at school that nobody has told you about. It might be a difficulty with the work that has never been named. Those need different answers, which is why a single piece of advice is no use here.
If your mornings look like this, you are not doing it badly. You are holding up a child who cannot fully explain what is wrong, against a clock that does not wait.
How it usually shows
In the body, and mostly on school days. Stomach ache, headache, feeling sick, at the point of thinking about school — and noticeably less of it, or none of it, on Saturday. That pattern is information. It does not mean the pain is invented: the pain is real, and it has a trigger.
At the door. Crying while getting dressed, holding on to the frame, going quiet in the car. Some days they go in and get through the day. Some days they do not get in at all.
In what they say. The teacher doesn’t like me. Nobody wants to sit with me. That may be an accurate description of something you need to know about, or it may be the nearest words a child has for a feeling they cannot name yet. Both are worth taking seriously, and the only way to tell is to find out what is actually happening at school.
In the house. The case reopens every morning. One adult gives way, the other gets angry, and the child learns — with nobody meaning it — that not going is an available exit. Meanwhile the two of you disagree about whether you are being firm or being cruel.
Why avoiding makes it grow
When something frightens a child, not going works. Immediately, and completely. The stomach settles the moment the decision is made.
That relief is the problem. It teaches. Every day that is skipped, school gets slightly larger and slightly harder to walk into, so the next morning takes more, so the exit gets used again. This is not the child being manipulative — it is how the system learns, in children and adults alike, and it is the same mechanism that runs adult avoidance.
Which is also why the answer is not to wait until they feel ready. Waiting for the fear to clear before going back is the one approach that reliably fails.
A tantrum is not this
Worth separating, because it changes what you do.
A row over a boundary — no screen time, no sweets, get your shoes on — is an event. It ends. This is a pattern: it repeats, it comes with physical symptoms, it clusters around school days, and it is starting to cost attendance.
Telling them apart stops you punishing something that is not defiance, and stops you conceding to something you have not understood yet.
The extra layer when you have just moved here
If the family arrived in Granada in the last year or two, there is a version of this that is specific to you, and it is easy to misread in either direction.
A child who is following lessons in a language they are still acquiring is working harder all day than the same child was at home — including the children in international schools, where the corridors, the playground and the friendships may run in a different language from the classroom. Being tired, quiet and reluctant in that situation is not the same thing as being anxious. Some of what you are seeing may simply be the cost of the day.
But he’s just adjusting is also the sentence that lets a real difficulty run for a whole academic year without anyone looking at it. Adjustment gets easier. If the mornings in February are worse than the mornings in October, that is not adjustment.
Two things are worth knowing. The playground is usually harder than the classroom — lessons have structure and an adult in them, break time has neither, and a child with limited language has nowhere to hide for half an hour. And in a school where families arrive and leave constantly, a child can lose two friends in a term through nobody’s fault at all, which is a real loss and often goes unmentioned at home.
What to do about the mornings
Ask a question that is not an interrogation. Does it hurt more when we think about school, or does it hurt on Saturday too? You are not trying to catch anybody out. You are looking for a clue. And if it does hurt at the weekend as well, look at sleep and eating, and take it to the doctor — the point is not to prove the child is pretending, it is to check their health properly.
Agree the morning in advance. What happens, who takes them, at what point you ask the school for help. Improvising every day is what produces the arguments; the plan does not have to be perfect, it has to be the same one tomorrow.
Stop aiming for the perfect day. If the only outcome that counts as success is a full day, cheerfully, then you are going to fail most Mondays and so are they. Getting to the gate counts. Going in for five minutes counts. Staying for the first lesson counts. What you are building is presence at school, in steps you can actually get.
Let the adults do the messaging. Talk to the class teacher, in private, and make sure the school and the house are saying the same thing. The child should not be the one carrying information between them.
Look at the boring things. Sleep, screens, how rushed the morning is, whether there is any part of the week with no performance in it. Taking twenty minutes of hurry out of the morning changes more than a conversation about feelings does.
When they come home, I saw you go in works better than a debrief. Questions can wait.
Nobody can promise this resolves in a fortnight. What tends to move it is understanding what is keeping it going and getting the adults — home and school — pulling the same way.
When to ask for help
When it has stopped being a bad week in September. When the stomach aches repeat around school and ease at the weekend. When every morning is a negotiation and the avoidance is growing rather than shrinking. When the school has raised it, or the doctor has handed the question back to you. When you have already changed the routines and it has not been enough.
You do not have to wait until they have stopped going altogether. If this has been running for weeks and you are hurting each other at the front door, that is a good enough moment.
And if what you are seeing goes wider than school — the withdrawal, the temper, a change you can feel across the whole house — there is a broader look at when to take a child or teenager to a psychologist here.
Talking it through in English
Fernando Ruiz Martínez is a psychologist and neuropsychologist in Granada (Col. M-39091), working in English or Spanish — useful when the child’s school runs in one language and home runs in another.
There is no waiting room to get anyone to: sessions are online, or at your home in Granada. The first conversation is free and can be by phone or video call, and it is perfectly normal for it to be the parents on that call rather than the child.