A few years ago, our daughter went through a period of intense anxiety and panic. It was often at its worst in the morning, and she would beg us to let her stay home from school.

One morning during that time stands out. It was my turn to talk her out of bed, and she insisted she was staying home.

I was torn. On the one hand, I knew she needed to go to school and that staying home was at best a temporary solution to her overwhelming anxiety. On the other hand, I wanted to spare my child from emotional pain, and forcing her to go to school just felt wrong.

Like countless parents who face this situation, I felt stuck and powerless. “You want to relieve their suffering,” says Regine Galanti, Ph.D., a licensed psychologist and author of the new book Parenting Anxious Kids. “And the easiest way to do that is to give them what they say they need.”

Understandably, many parents wind up letting their children stay home because of anxiety. On a gut level, I thought that maybe we could wait till the anxiety wasn’t so bad, and then our daughter could go back to school. But unfortunately, that’s not how it tends to work.

There typically is a steep cost when we let a child stay home because of anxiety. Rather than making things easier down the road, it leads to even more anxiety about school and less willingness to go. “If you let a kid stay home from school repeatedly [because they’re anxious],” says Galanti, “you’re going to make their anxiety so much worse.”

As a result, one........

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