Why Does My Kid’s Tummy Hurt At School? Hidden Causes And Simple Fixes For Parents And Teachers
It’s 9:15 on a Tuesday, and Mia’s hand is up before I finish the morning announcement. “My tummy hurts,” she mumbles, shoulders hunched over her chipped unicorn water bottle, scuffed sneakers tapping a fast rhythm on the classroom rug. I’ve been a second-grade teacher for four years, and I get this line at least twice a week. For the first year, I followed the script: I’d feel her forehead, ask if she thinks she needs the nurse, and send her off with a hall pass. Most of the time, she’d come back 20 minutes later, good as new, and I’d file it under “avoiding math” or “mild lunch indigestion” and move on. That changed when I started asking one simple question: When did your tummy start hurting?
Last fall, Mia had that same hunched look right before we lined up for PE. I was running late for a district meeting, but I paused, pulled a chair next to her, and asked that question. She thought for a minute, then said, “When you said it’s time for PE.” I asked her what was happening in PE that makes her tummy hurt, and it came out: she’d broken her wrist a month before, the cast had just come off, and she had a lumpy, pink scar running up her forearm. She didn’t want anyone to see it when they changed for PE in the open locker room. She hadn’t told anyone, not me, not her mom, because she thought it was silly to be upset about a scar.
That’s when I realized how many tummy aches at school aren’t just a bad sandwich or a trick to go home. Kids this age don’t have the words to name what they’re feeling. When your chest tightens and your stomach twists from nervousness, you don’t think “I’m anxious about changing clothes.” You just think “my tummy hurts.” And the pain is real, even if the cause isn’t a stomach bug. It doesn’t mean they’re faking it.
A few weeks later, Javi told me his tummy hurt. I asked the same question: When did it start? “Right when you said we’re going to reading groups.” Javi struggles with sounding out words, and he’d been teased a few weeks earlier when he stumbled over a sentence in front of the whole group. He wasn’t skipping reading groups to get out of work—his tummy actually hurt every time he thought about reading out loud. We worked out a simple plan: he reads his paragraph to me one-on-one at my desk before joining the small group, so he knows he won’t stumble. His tummy aches stopped within a week.
Not all tummy aches are from nerves, of course. Leo, who joined my class mid-year last year, had tummy aches almost every morning. When I asked when it started, he said it’s “always like this before lunch.” Turns out he skips breakfast most days—his mom leaves for work early, and he’s too nervous to make his own, and he won’t eat the school breakfast because he hates the smell of scrambled eggs they serve every day. He was embarrassed to tell anyone he didn’t eat, so he just said his tummy hurt. I keep a box of plain, nut-free crackers in the back cabinet of my classroom now, for anyone who needs a quick snack. Leo grabs one most mornings, and his tummy aches are gone. That’s a 2-minute fix that took me three years to figure out.
I get a lot of emails from parents asking why their kid only gets tummy aches at school. The first thing I tell them is to ask the same question I do: What were you doing right when your tummy started hurting? Don’t lead with “were you scared?” or “are you being bullied?” That puts kids on the defensive, and they’ll usually say no just to end the conversation. Asking what they were doing when it started helps them connect the dots themselves, even if they didn’t realize there was a link. The second thing I tell parents is to jot down patterns. If the tummy ache happens every Monday, or every time there’s a math test, or before PE, that’s a clear clue that it’s tied to a specific situation, not a random bug.
For example, I have one student who gets tummy aches after whole-school assemblies. He’s sensitive to loud noise and big crowds, but he can’t explain that he’s overstimulated. He just knows his tummy hurts when it’s over. We worked out a plan: he can bring his noise-canceling headphones to assemblies, and he can leave five minutes early to walk back to the classroom and get a drink of water. That’s a tiny change, but it cut his tummy aches by 90%.
I still send kids to the nurse sometimes, of course. Sometimes it really is a stomach bug, or something they ate for lunch that didn’t agree with them. But most of the time, the answer is something small, something you can fix with a tiny adjustment, once you know what it is.
Last week, a new girl named Lila told me her tummy hurts right after recess. I asked when it started, and she said when all the other girls were playing four square and she didn’t know how to ask to join. We haven’t fixed it yet—we’re practicing asking to join this week, and we’re going to see how it goes. I keep my crackers stocked, I keep asking that question, and that’s enough more often than not. Tummy aches at school aren’t a problem to solve overnight. They’re just kids telling us something, in the only words they know how.
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