It was a Tuesday morning when my son told me his stomach hurt. Not a big dramatic announcement — just a small, quiet statement while he was eating toast. "Mum, my tummy hurts." I asked if he felt sick. He shook his head. Asked if he'd eaten something funny. No. And then, so quietly I almost missed it: "I just don't want to go today."
It wasn't the first time. It wasn't even the tenth. Some mornings it was stomach aches. Some mornings it was headaches. Sometimes it was big, gulping tears that came from nowhere and couldn't really be explained. And often — so often — it was just this general low-level dread that sat over our house on school mornings like a grey cloud.
What I didn't understand for a long time was that what I was watching wasn't just ADHD. It was ADHD and anxiety. And when those two things live together in the same brain, they create something that's harder to untangle than either one on its own.
Why ADHD and Anxiety So Often Come Together
Here's something that surprised me when I finally read the research: up to 50% of children with ADHD also have an anxiety disorder. Half. That means if your ADHD child is also a chronic worrier, you are not imagining it and you are far from alone.
There are a few reasons the two tend to travel together. The ADHD brain that struggles with executive function — planning, organising, remembering, managing transitions — often develops anxiety as a response to constantly feeling behind, overwhelmed, or unprepared. School is a place where those struggles are on full display, every single day. It makes sense that a child who regularly finds themselves confused, behind, or embarrassed would start dreading it.
Rejection sensitive dysphoria — that intense emotional response to perceived failure or criticism that's so common in ADHD — also feeds anxiety. When you feel every "wrong" answer and every social misstep as deeply and painfully as our kids do, it's not surprising that you start trying to avoid situations where those things might happen.
What School Anxiety Actually Looks Like
School anxiety in ADHD kids doesn't always look like what you might expect. It's not always a child saying "I'm scared" or crying dramatically at the school gate (though sometimes it is). Often it's more subtle, and more exhausting.
It can look like:
- Recurring physical complaints — stomach aches, headaches, feeling sick — specifically on school mornings
- Asking the same questions over and over ("What if the teacher is angry? What if I get it wrong? What if nobody wants to sit with me?")
- Refusing to attempt work they might not do perfectly
- Extreme resistance to school — meltdowns, school refusal, crying at drop-off
- Social withdrawal — not wanting to engage with other kids, preferring to stay near the teacher
- Massive decompression meltdowns after school — all the tension they held in all day coming out at home
- Nighttime worrying — not being able to sleep because they're thinking about tomorrow
What makes it especially hard is that some of these look like ADHD behaviour. The resistance to school could be ADHD avoidance — or it could be anxiety. The big after-school meltdown could be emotional dysregulation — or anxiety release. Often it's both. Which is why working out what's driving what matters so much.
The ADHD-Anxiety Trap
Here's the cruel loop that many of our kids get stuck in. ADHD makes school hard. Hard things create anxiety. Anxiety makes it harder to use the already-limited executive function the ADHD brain has. Which makes school even harder. Which increases the anxiety. And around it goes.
"My son doesn't just struggle with school — he's scared of it. And once I understood that, everything about how I responded to him changed."
Anxiety also masks ADHD in some kids — particularly girls, and particularly children who are academically capable. They white-knuckle through school using anxiety-driven perfectionism to keep up, and by the time they get home they're completely depleted. The anxiety looks like effort. The effort hides the ADHD. And nobody realises how much it's costing them until they hit a wall.
What Actually Helps
1. Name it — with them, and for them. A child who understands that their brain has two things happening — the ADHD part that makes organising and sitting still hard, and the anxiety part that makes their brain throw up lots of "what if" warnings — has enormous power over those experiences. Not naming it doesn't make it go away. Naming it makes it less scary.
2. Create predictability wherever you can. Anxious ADHD brains are calmed by knowing what's coming. Visual schedules, consistent routines, previewing what the day looks like at breakfast, warning of transitions before they happen — these aren't just good ADHD strategies. They're anxiety management too. When the brain isn't burning energy on "what's going to happen next," it has more capacity for everything else.
3. Validate the worry without feeding it. This is a hard balance. You want your child to feel heard — "I can see you're really worried about today" — but you don't want to endlessly reassure in ways that actually reinforce the anxiety. Try: "I hear you that you're worried. And I know you can handle hard things." Acknowledge the feeling. Trust them with it.
4. Work with the school, not just around it. Does your child's teacher know about the anxiety? Not just the ADHD, but specifically the worry and school dread? Teachers who understand this can make small but significant adjustments — warning your child before they're called on rather than cold-calling them, providing a safe check-in spot, reducing the performance pressure on tasks that are already hard. A school that understands what's happening is worth its weight in gold.
5. Get the body regulated before the brain. Anxious children cannot think their way out of anxiety when they're already activated. Movement, deep pressure, slow breathing — these work on the nervous system before any cognitive strategies can land. A weighted blanket for the car ride to school, a quick run around the backyard before drop-off, even five deep breaths together can shift the physical state enough to make the day more manageable.
6. Consider whether the anxiety needs its own support. Sometimes — not always, but sometimes — ADHD-related anxiety is significant enough to benefit from its own treatment. A psychologist who understands ADHD and anxiety together (both matter — not just one) can make a real difference. It's not failure to seek that support. It's the opposite.
What to Do This Week
If you read this and thought "that's my kid" — start with one small thing. Have a quiet conversation with your child this week (not on a hard morning, but in a calm moment) about what school feels like for them. Not to fix it, just to understand it. Ask what the hardest part is. Ask what would make it feel safer.
You might be surprised by what they tell you when they feel truly safe to say it.
And if you're not sure whether what you're seeing is anxiety, ADHD, or both — write it down. Keep a short log for a week or two of when the physical complaints and worries show up, and what was happening before them. Patterns will emerge. And those patterns are valuable information for your GP, paediatrician, or school.
You Don't Have to Figure This Out Alone
Parenting a child with ADHD and anxiety is a particular kind of exhausting — because you're managing their nervous system while trying to regulate your own. And most of the world doesn't really understand what that's like.
That's exactly why Tribe Together exists. A community of Australian parents who get it — who know the difference between a bad day and a pattern, who understand why you feel guilty for being relieved when school holidays start, and who show up for each other on the hard mornings.
Grab our free ADHD Parent Survival Kit for strategies, resources, and tools designed for exactly this — including guides to understanding anxiety alongside ADHD, and how to advocate for your child at school. Because you deserve a village. And so does your child.