How to Manage Back-to-School Madness
Tips for surviving the fall chaos.
Quick preamble: I’m running a week-long Back-to-School Sale! From now through September 13, you can get 30% off paid subscriptions AND a 7-day free trial. With a paid subscription, you’ll support my reporting, get to participate in my threads (where you’ll get to meet other awesome parents), be able to comment on all posts and receive my special subscriber-only posts.
I always look forward to Labor Day weekend as a final summer hurrah, but every year, I instead find myself wondering why my children have lost their minds. My kids went back to school on Thursday. On Friday, my 11-year-old threw half of his books across his room when he couldn’t find his soccer socks. On Saturday, my 8-year-old began wailing at 7:30am and didn’t stop for hours, crying over… well, I’m still not sure exactly what. September is our family’s annual Witching Hour, when my kids are hot emotional messes and the house is in complete disarray and my Gmail inbox contains 159,622 unread messages (yeah, no, I’m not kidding).
I was disheartened — but honestly a little bit relieved too — to learn from last week’s newsletter thread that many of you are suffering through kid emotional madness, too. So I thought I’d try to re-connect with my rational brain and share research-backed approaches for handling the zany back-to-school transition.
First, let’s unpack why kids turn into ogres in September. It’s largely because transitions are really, really hard for children. Consider what it’s like to be a kid: Pretty much everything is out of your control. Your parents and teachers dictate where you go, what you eat, and what activities you’re allowed to do. With so little power, you cling onto the things you have (occasional) control over — which is why you throw a fit when you are served lunch on the red plate when you wanted the blue one.
This lack of autonomy is also why kids love routines: They feel a sense of security when they know what’s going to happen when. They may not get to choose what’s coming, but at least they know what’s coming, and that is something.
So when kids’ schedules get upended in the fall when they go back to school, they understandably feel extra unsettled and anxious. Life suddenly becomes a high-speed whitewater rafting ride where nobody knows what’s around the next corner. What will happen when I walk into my classroom? Will my teacher continue to be nice? What will we have to do today? Will I make friends? The loss of control and predictability on top of all the other daily chaos is disconcerting, and kids can react by becoming more emotionally sensitive and challenging.
This all said, there are things you can do to make the back-to-school transition easier and lessen the intensity of your kid’s challenging behavior. Here are some science-based tips for surviving the next few weeks.
1. Craft a new routine and help kids understand and anticipate it.
Since transitions are hard in large part because they upend kids’ existing schedules, it makes sense that creating a new, predictable daily routine can make things easier. Even if your kid’s schedule varies from day-to-day, try to build in some static elements. Maybe you wake them up at the same time each day and you offer them the same three options for breakfast. Perhaps after they get home from school or daycare, they know they immediately get a snack. The idea is to build some predictability into each day, so that they regain a sense of control.
Some kids thrive best when they know about their schedule well in advance. Whenever we go through a transition, my daughter likes to write down the plan for the day when she first wakes up, and she refers back to it repeatedly. If you’re not sure about your child’s school schedule, ask their teacher if they might be willing to share it with you, and then print it out and go over it with your child.
If the things your kids look forward to are shifting, make sure they understand how and when they’ll get to do those things again. This summer, my kids had screen time from 6pm to 6:45pm each day. But this fall, late soccer practices will make that time window impossible. So last weekend, my husband and I sat down and figured out when each child will have screen time on each day, and we noted each child’s times down on a physical calendar that we will tape onto the refrigerator so our kids can refer to it.
2. Understand that kids might regress and that’s normal.
One thing that kids often do during transitions is regress, meaning they engage in behaviors you thought they’d grown out of. They might demand their old teddy bear, ask to watch shows they watched two years ago, start having accidents again or begin waking up at night. Regressions are frustrating, because they give you the sense that your child has suddenly lost key skills you’ve worked hard on, but they are normal — and typically temporary. Here’s an excerpt from a story I wrote a couple of years ago in The New York Times about why kids regress:
Regressions happen, in part, because kids want more from their parents when they feel unsettled or anxious, and regressions ensure that they’ll get that extra attention. [Barnard College child psychologist Tovah] Klein calls them a “retreat back to mommy and daddy” — exactly what my daughter was doing when she demanded hugs at night. She was stressed about her new school and suddenly needed me more, and her regressive midnight screams were an easy way to get me.
Regressive behavior can also be about gaining or maintaining control. When my son is going through a transition, like when we go on vacation or when he’s about to start a new school year, he’ll become extra rigid and act out in weirdly controlling ways — he’ll have to be the first one down to breakfast in the morning or else he’ll lose his temper. This sudden need for control compensates for feeling a loss of control in other parts of his life. (These behaviors are largely subconscious, by the way — kids aren’t doing them on purpose to drive parents nuts, even though it sometimes feels that way.)
If your kid regresses, what should you do? Stay calm and give them extra love and reassurance. Tell your child that you’ll always be there for them. Regression typically happens because your child is scared or overwhelmed, so extra parental support really helps. Once your kids have gotten used to their new schedule, they often drop their regressive behaviors.
3. When kids have outbursts or meltdowns, acknowledge their feelings rather than trying to fix them.
For me, the hardest thing about big transitions is that my kids suddenly become highly explosive. Something that my kid would have shrugged off as no big deal two months ago is suddenly The Literal End of the World and incites a 20-minute-long meltdown. It’s exhausting.
It always helps me when I remind myself that this is totally normal, that it’s not at all a reflection on me or my parenting, and it’s temporary. Big transitions are hard for me, too — but I have an adult brain that can (mostly) handle the stress without collapsing onto the floor and screaming. I have said this before, and I’ll say it again: The part of the brain responsible for impulse control does not fully mature until the age of 25. So when kids are upset, they often act on it. They scream. They cry. Those screams and cries help them re-regulate.
This said, kids sometimes can successfully hold in their feelings at school — but the downside is that once they get home, they let them all out. (I see this as a sign of love and trust: Your kid feels comfortable being challenging and screamy in front of you because they know that you will love them no matter what.) My husband and I often comment on how adept our daughter is at finding a reason to have a meltdown within the first four minutes of getting off the school bus. On Instagram, my friend Dr. Krupa Playforth, a.k.a. The Pediatrician Mom, recently shared tips for managing and preventing after-school meltdowns, which include being as un-demanding as possible (for instance by not pressuring your kids to talk about their school day) and making sure they have immediate access to snacks.
As for what to do in response to big feelings: Stay calm and empathize. Listen and offer support. When my daughter started screaming at me because I had the gall to ask her how her soccer practice went, I said something like “Okay, I can see you’re really upset. I’m going to give you a bit of space, but if you want a hug or a snack or a snuggle, I’ll be in the kitchen.” Of course, you are still allowed to — and encouraged to — set limits and boundaries. When my son threw his books across the room when he couldn’t find his soccer socks, I acknowledged his anger but also told him he needed to find a more appropriate way to express it, because it’s not okay to throw books.
All too often, we instead try to jump in and “fix” the situation in one of a handful of ways: We tell our kid to “calm down” or “stop crying”; we try to reassure them with platitudes like “you’re okay”; or we jump in with advice or suggestions. But honestly, the best thing to do is the simplest thing of all: Tell them you hear them, that you know they’re upset, and that you’re there for them.
Related posts from Is My Kid the Asshole?:
Other helpful resources:
In last week’s Well newsletter for The New York Times, I wrote about motion sickness: Why it happens and what to do about it. Fingers crossed my 8-year-old never vomits in the car again. Read it here.
