PERSPECTIVE article
Front. Child Adolesc. Psychiatry
Sec. Child Mental Health and Interventions
Volume 4 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/frcha.2025.1662093
This article is part of the Research TopicAddressing emotionally based school avoidance: causes, consequences, and interventionsView all 15 articles
Framing chronic absenteeism and emotionally-based school absenteeism as public health problems
Provisionally accepted
- University of Nevada, Las Vegas, Las Vegas, United States
Select one of your emails
You have multiple emails registered with Frontiers:
Notify me on publication
Please enter your email address:
If you already have an account, please login
You don't have a Frontiers account ? You can register here
Chronic school absenteeism (CSA) and emotionally-based school absenteeism or avoidance (EBSA) are highly prevalent conditions linked to multiple short-and long-term problems across academic, social-emotional, physical and mental health, family, and occupational and economic domains of functioning. In addition, CSA and EBSA occur disproportionately across vulnerable student groups and have been the focus of extensive preventative and intervention efforts. As such, CSA and EBSA may meet criteria as formal public health problems. This perspective article illustrates various ways of framing CSA and EBSA in this fashion utilizing contemporary public health models. Categories of public health models are emphasized in this regard and include ecological, systems and policy, epidemiologic and statistical, environmental and occupational, and behavioral and social science approaches. Each approach closely parallels research and other work regarding school absenteeism.The article is designed as a step toward advocacy for recognizing CSA and EBSA as formal public health problems contingent upon consensus among key constituencies in this area.
Keywords: Chronic school absenteeism1, emotionally-based school absenteeism2, public health3, ecological4, systems and policy5, epidemiologic and statistical6, environmental and occupational7, behavioral and social science8
Received: 08 Jul 2025; Accepted: 11 Aug 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Kearney. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Christopher A. Kearney, University of Nevada, Las Vegas, Las Vegas, United States
Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.