Q According to his PE teacher (Kindergarten), our son has recently started refusing to participate in class. He sits off to the side and pouts. She said he won’t tell her what the problem is. This is a very active child who comes home and plays outside with other kids most of the afternoon. We tried to talk to him about it but like the teacher, got nowhere. What should we do?

A If your son has no difficulty making friends and enjoys being active, then the first thing to do is play Sherlock Holmes to see if you can discover any clues that might explain this mystery. Start your sleuthing by talking to the PE teacher. Maybe something happened in class recently that might have caused your son embarrassment. If that conversation doesn’t help clear up the mystery, then call other mothers and ask if they’ve heard any comments about PE from their kids. Have their children said anything about your son and his refusal to participate? If there’s a way you can observe the class without your son knowing, I’d consider doing that as well. Hopefully, you’ll discover the problem and be able to do something to help solve it. He may have misinterpreted something that happened in class one day, for example, and doesn’t have the language skills to put it into words.

If you come up empty-handed, however, then the explanation may be that there is no explanation. As also happens with adults, children sometimes get into funky moods for no “good” reason. Most people have experienced spontaneous lows like this at times and not been able to make sense of and explain the feeling. You wake up one morning and just don’t feel like going to work, for example, but can’t identify any specific incident that might have caused you to feel that way. Regardless, you get up and go, but you feel “under the weather” for several days.

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