School stress causing illness?

Has anyone ever dealt with a child being plagued by illnesses that only happen at school? Can the boredom at school cause physical illness? 

I seem to be dealing with this issue of headaches, tiredness, stomachaches. The teacher seems concerned about it. I'm not sure if it is stress and anxiety manifesting itself or a real illness. I just had his eyes checked and the doctor says all the tests say he is a-ok. 

My gut says it is caused by his emotional state. He is better at home and doesn't complain about these ailments at home. I'm afraid he is truly suffering from not having a learning environment at school. I can't homeschool him the rest of the schoolyear even though he begs to do that on a weekly basis. He frequently asks why he is forced to waste his energy on things he already knows. It has been a difficult year, so I just wonder if this is starting to affect him in other ways.

I'd love to hear if anyone else has encountered something like this and how it was addressed. 

I'm on my phone so I'll be brief. I do believe stress can cause illness or symptoms. I wonder if anything else is going on other than lack of challenge. Does he have friends? Is he being bullied? Or shunned in some way?
I hope you get some answers and I hope your ds feels better. Poor guy.

Poor baby. I have to say that back in 1st, DD frequently had migraines in class and when doing homework. She does have migraines (they run in the family) but I believe the frequency and intensity were caused by the, erm, educational and social mismatch. So definitely don't count stress out. You might have the Dr. validate that he doesn't have something, and then take the diagnosis (or lack of) to the school to talk about accommodations.

Are you sure the symptoms are real? Some kids learn quickly that showing symptoms allows them to go home, or at least to a friendly nurse, away from a painfully boring classroom...

Thanks for the replies! He seems to be doing well socially. There is a bully in the mix, but he seems to be dealing with that ok. I immediately made the connection of a stomachache after getting in trouble from protecting his best friend from an aggressive boy. He just told me recently that he found a "true" friend, but he's pretty sociable and well-liked. I've volunteered at school just to get to know the kids in his class. He leads games at recess, so that's a good sign.

The doctor checked him quite thoroughly with blood tests and x-rays. He's healthy. The afternoon fatigue is unusual, but it could be growing pains. He seems to be popping up with new complaints every day. I try hard not to overreact and he's complained for a month before I finally, half-heartedly took him to the doctor. I knew it would likely be nothing and I was correct.

He has begged to be homeschooled for months. I work with him after-school to provide challenge. We work well together, but homeschooling isn't in the cards at the moment. That is why I think he is being affected by going to school. He sounds so hopeless talking about what he does at school. There are a few bright spots, but he's having a hard time with not spending his time learning new things.

He is sensitive to how his body feels and amazingly aware. I just wonder how to accommodate this situation.

Yes, school stress can cause illness. My child gets a stomach ache when he gets anxious - his description is that his stomach aches are similar to the "gforces that one feels in the tummy while on a roller coaster". We had a lot of these episodes in K, last year.
They vanished when we upped the intensity of afterschool activities, academics and enrichment. I suggest that you challenge your child not just academically, but also in other areas that would keep him involved - in our case, it was chess school, piano, martial arts and swim team - we did these pretty rigorously because my child has a lot of intensity and school just wasn't enough. We also used advanced curriculum to teach his favorite subjects.
My child started looking forward to school because he met his friends and socialized heavily there.
This year, we moved to an academics oriented private school and he is happier than before. We still afterschool.

My DD started with such complaints in kindergarten at a terrible placement ending up in the nurse's office almost daily with a stomachache. I thought it was anxiety from a combo of terrible teachers/bullies/inappropriate work. Turned out that yes she had developed anxiety but also was VERY 2E with just about every imaginable learning disability AND was experiencing migraines. I found out after the fact that migraines in young children commonly manifest first in stomach pain known as abdominal migraines. It was fall of 1st grade that she started to present with the more traditional appearing migraine and we got a diagnosis. So yes it may be just boredom and stress but it could also be fluorescent lighting, loud group activities, visual noise (some patterns in clothing or on certain wall charts can trigger my migraines big time), smells, certain foods, etc.

Can a crappy job make you feel ill? A kid's 'job' is school, right...

Stress can absolutely cause physical illness in children. DS7 used to throw up several times a week when he was in a rigid classroom environment in an IB primary years program with a teacher who tended to use shame to get her point across (even though she was a gifted-certified teacher. . . sigh) DS is HG+, has some sensory issues and tics, and is a little behind peers in his fine motor skills. The rigidity and shaming were overtly harmful for him. It took us awhile to get to the root of the problem.

We moved DS to another school with a more relaxed approach to education and a part-time gifted pull out program that was geared more toward the social and emotional needs of gifted students. The vomiting stopped immediately and his tics slowed WAY down. Trust your gut on this one.

Stress can cause symptoms. Also, do you think it is possible he is making up symptoms to get out of class because he is bored and frustrated? Or do you believe he actually feels ill? Are you picking him up early from school when he has these symptoms? The fact that he doesn't have them at home seems very telling.

I do believe school stress can cause symptoms, but I also know from personal experience that a 6 year old can figure out that pretending to be sick can get him out of doing things that he doesn't want to do.

Can you tell the teacher that you think it may be because of stress due to a lack of challenge, and ask her to give him more challenging work to see if it helps?

We actually went through this last year with stomach aches too, but that one was really because he thought he could go home. He went home once and then his teacher caught on quickly and just had him stay at his desk when he complained. It stopped quickly.

His teacher this year also just lets him hang out at his desk instead of calling us for every little complaint. We've received calls a couple times, but only once did he go home. Another odd thing is that it is always in the afternoon. Lunchtime or after and never in the morning. I think what he is feeling is real, but he's either very sensitive or making the symptoms seem much worse than they really are.

We have tried really hard to engage him in things outside of school. We have him in a lot of enriching activities like chess, piano, karate and swimming. We have tried the "more challenging" approach to get him something to do in class. When he finishes early, he has extra challenge math worksheets to do. He frequently grabs those or reads. His teacher just recently let us determine his homework too.

I keep telling him that there's only about 10 weeks left of school. Spring Break is in a couple of weeks and he'll have an awesome engineering camp to look forward to. I think that's the hardest to deal with. If it really is stress, then it's too late in the year to change schools. We've done what we can to help him, but it's just that 6 hours a day that we can't change for him. He is HG+ and it seems like no matter what we've tried, the educational mismatch is affecting him in ways I didn't think it would.

It's comforting to hear that other kids have done well by changing the learning environment. I'd withdraw him and homeschool in a heartbeat if I could. I'd just like him to finish out the school year. Next year, things have to change.

For an alternate thought... does he eat the same things at school as he eats at home?

That's a great question. I was just reading a similar thread on another site in which many of the comments were about food. He usually takes his lunch, so I will have to see if these issues are popping up then eats the school food. I hadn't thought of that. I will definitely keep track now.

Something else to consider is environmental factors. Lots of scented products kids sometimes go crazy for, poor ventilation in a portable classroom, florescent lighting, etc? Just another thing to consider (as a teacher I've heard stories from colleagues about getting very sick transferring into a new school with mold problems and I personally felt sick in my Spanish class in high school at the edge of school and I finally figured out kids were smoking behind it). But it does sound like stress and possibly diet.