The Cost of Avoidance
What avoidance can look like and how it impacts learners
There's a piece of research that came my way this week, and I want to think through it with you (rather than at you), because it touches something genuinely complicated.
A Teachers College Columbia University op-ed, originally published in the Boston Globe, was written by two psychologists who study and treat anxiety. Their argument, stated plainly: schools are accommodating student anxiety in ways that are making it worse. Not because the people involved don't care or aren’t compassionate, but because avoidance, however well-intentioned, tends to feed anxiety rather than reduce it.
The example they open with is a grade 10 student excused from oral presentations on the basis of a therapist's note. They describe this as a scenario playing out nationally. And they cite a 2022 study finding that the average anxious student receives around twenty school-based supports, many of them avoidance-based, things like separate rooms, lighter workloads, and extensions. That same study found that 92.5% of school staff reported using at least one accommodation that anxiety experts would classify as avoidance-promoting. Ninety-two point five percent (!)…that's not an outlier, that's a pattern.
Their central claim is one I am holding top of mind and heart: “when students take on what they'd rather avoid, they learn that worst-case scenarios rarely materialize, that discomfort is survivable, and that anxiety diminishes with practice.”
I am not a psychologist, and this newsletter is not a clinical recommendation. What I am is a learning strategist who has spent nearly two decades working with learners on the how of learning, and this research lands squarely in the middle of that work.
And this is definitely showing up in the learners I work with.
The Commonality of Avoidance
Avoidance is one of the most common (and most costly) learning habits there is. Not always avoidance of something frightening in the clinical sense, but avoidance of discomfort more broadly.
► The essay left unstarted because it might not be good enough.
► The study session skipped because the material feels too hard to face.
► The class skipped because the assigned reading was intimidatingly challenging.
► The question not asked in class because what if it sounds stupid.
► The presentation prepared halfway because finishing it would mean it's real, and really happening, and could be judged.
These are not anxiety disorders. They are the everyday, almost universal experience of learning (and just being a person), which involves being uncertain, being wrong, being seen not knowing something, feeling awkward, feeling bored, feeling out of one’s depths…and doing it anyway.
What the research points to, and what I see confirmed in the learners I work with, is that the more we structure around those moments of discomfort rather than through them, the larger those moments tend to grow.
Before going further, something important needs naming, because this conversation can tip into territory that feels like it's dismissing what anxious learners genuinely experience, and I don't want to do that. (Remember, as a learning strategist, my life has been supporting learners with profoundly and clinically anxious journeys.)
Accommodation Needs
Before going further, something important needs naming, because this conversation can tip into territory that feels like it's dismissing what anxious learners genuinely experience, and I don't want to do that. (Remember, as a learning strategist, my life has been supporting learners with profoundly and clinically anxious journeys.)
The research does not argue against accommodations themselves. It argues against accommodations that mainly enable avoidance rather than skill-building. That's a meaningful distinction (and is one at the heart of learning strategy work).
Some accommodations lower access barriers without reinforcing fear. Previewing transitions, offering movement breaks, providing a quiet workspace when sensory overwhelm is the issue…these are supports that help a learner participate and regulate, not escape. Other accommodations, the ones the research raises concerns about, repeatedly allow students to sidestep the anxiety-provoking situation entirely. The first kind can genuinely help. The second kind, used consistently over time, may quietly confirm to a learner that the situation was too dangerous to face, and that they weren't capable of facing it.
Researchers and clinicians in this area are increasingly pointing toward a middle path: planned, graduated support strategies rather than universal exemption. Reducing barriers to participation where that's genuinely what's needed, while building toward fulsome engagement rather than away from it. Skill goes up = scariness does down.
For neurodivergent learners especially, this conversation is more layered and more individual than any generalization can hold, and it deserves to be treated that way. The accommodation conversation for a learner with ADHD, a processing difference, or a sensory profile looks different from the accommodation conversation for a learner whose primary challenge is worry around performance. Those aren't the same situation, and the same response doesn't serve both. Nothing is being simplified or collapsed here.
How Attendance Impacts Student Confidence
From my corner of this conversation, what I know is this…
The learners who develop the most durable confidence are almost never the ones who were protected from difficulty. They are the ones who attempted something hard, struggled with it, got through it imperfectly, and discovered that they could. That discovery, that specific, embodied knowledge that I can do hard things even when I don't want to, is not something a strategy or a tool or an accommodation can hand to a learner. It is earned through the (unpleasantness of) doing.
Task initiation is a perfect example. The hardest part of most tasks isn't the task itself. It's the moment before it begins, when everything in you is saying it's too much, that you're not ready, that you should wait until conditions are better. The learning strategy isn't to make that feeling go away. It's to do the first small thing anyway, and let the evidence of your own follow-through slowly become the thing you trust.
A Norwegian research summary puts it plainly: teachers can reinforce student anxiety through well-intentioned measures. Not through cruelty or inattention, not through exclusion or dismissiveness, but through care that inadvertently communicates, “this situation is too much for you.” That message, repeated, becomes something a learner starts to believe.
The Lessons for Educators
I don't think the answer here is to make school harder for the sake of it, or to dismiss what anxious learners are genuinely experiencing, or to flatten the very real differences between a learner who is navigating ordinary human challenge and a learner who is in genuine clinical distress. Those are different situations and they deserve different responses.
But I do think the question the research raises is worth bringing into our homes and classrooms and edu-conversations: when we make something easier for a learner, what are we teaching them? About the task, yes, but also about themselves?
The authors of the Teachers College piece put it this way: fostering children's development often requires withstanding momentary upset while expressing confidence in their capabilities. The payoff, they write, is not just reduced anxiety…it's increased competence.
That second part is what I keep returning to: competence. The real kind, built through contact with difficulty, not around it.
