Why Kids Feel Overwhelmed By Too Many Upcoming Obligations (And What To Try Instead)
It’s 6:15 on a Tuesday, I’m stirring jarred marinara for pasta, and my 13-year-old daughter Lila just dumped her soccer bag on the kitchen tile, leaving a faint Gatorade stain I’ll find when I mop later. She slams her Chromebook shut after checking the school portal, grabs her phone, and starts typing fast into her notes app. “What are you writing?” I ask, not looking up from the stove. She holds up the screen, brightness cranked all the way up, and says, “Literally all of my obligations until the 23rd.”
I lean in to look. The list is color-coded: pink for school, blue for family, green for volunteer commitments. It runs all the way from that Thursday to the 23rd, the day after my sister’s wedding and the night of Lila’s middle school holiday band concert. There are three midterms, two after-school project check-ins, daily 90-minute rehearsals, a bake sale for the local animal shelter she volunteers at, my nephew’s 8th birthday party, bridesmaid dress fittings, wrapping the wedding gift, and even tiny throwaway items like “return library book” and “text Mia back about sleepover.” The last line, dated the 23rd, says “done with everything.”
My first instinct, the one I’ve had a hundred times before, is to start crossing things off. “You don’t have to do the bake sale, you already have so much going on,” I almost say. “We can skip the dress fitting, I’ll pick it up for you,” is right on the tip of my tongue too. Last fall, when Lila complained about being overwhelmed with homework and art club and soccer, I jumped straight to suggesting she quit art club, her favorite thing. She didn’t speak to me for two hours, and later told me I made it feel like she couldn’t handle anything on her own. That memory stops me this time.
Instead, I wipe my hands on my jeans and say, “Can I see that closer?” I scroll through it slow, making sure I see every line, even the tiny ones. “Wow,” I say, “that’s a lot to hold bouncing around in your head. No wonder you needed to get it all down on paper.” Lila’s shoulders, which had been hunched up near her ears this whole time, drop an inch. She nods, and takes her phone back. “My brain won’t stop turning all of it over,” she says. “If it’s all on the list, it stops bugging me when I’m trying to do homework.”
I work part-time as an instructional aide at the local elementary school, so I’ve seen this play out with younger kids too. A few weeks back, a 4th grader in my class refused to start his book report, saying he “had too much stuff” and couldn’t do it. He was half-crying, crumpling his paper up on his desk. Before I could jump in and tell him it would be okay, I remembered what I’d been practicing, so I just pulled a blank sheet of paper over to his desk and said, “Why don’t you write every single thing you have to do this week, even the small stuff you think doesn’t count?” He wrote everything: book report, return permission slip for the field trip, practice for soccer game, feed my hamster, get new pencils for math. When he was done, he stared at the list for 10 seconds and said, “Oh, the book report isn’t due until Friday. I can do it after soccer tomorrow.” He’d had all the information he needed to solve his own problem, it was just stuck messy and unorganized in his head.
That’s the thing no one tells you about kid stress, I’ve noticed. Most of the time, when they dump a big list of obligations on you, they don’t want you to fix it. They just want you to witness it, and to help them get it out of their head where it’s taking up too much space. Our job as parents and teachers isn’t always to remove the load. It’s to help them lay the load out on the table so they can see what’s actually there, instead of carrying it all messy in the dark.
What’s worked for me, that I think anyone can try, is really simple. First, if your kid says they’re overwhelmed, don’t jump into problem solving. Just hand them a piece of paper or open their notes app and tell them to write every single thing down, even the stuff that feels too small to add. Don’t interrupt them while they write, don’t comment on how “silly” it is to add returning a library book to the list. Just let them get it all out. Second, when they’re done, the only thing you need to say first is “That really is a lot. That makes sense you’re stressed.” You don’t need to cheer them up, you don’t need to minimize what they’re feeling. Just validate that it’s a big pile. Third, walk away and wait. Nine times out of ten, they’ll come to you with what they need shifted or cut on their own, because now they can see the whole picture.
With Lila, we were 10 minutes into eating pasta when she leaned back in her chair and said, “Wait, can we move the birthday cake pickup from Wednesday to Thursday? I have rehearsal until 5 Wednesday, I was stressing about making it on time.” That was the only change she wanted. She still wanted to do the bake sale, she still wanted to go to the dress fitting, she just needed that one thing shifted. I said yes, no questions asked.
It’s now the 17th, six days after that list was made. She checks off one or two things every night before bed. She baked her three dozen cookies on Sunday while we watched a silly Christmas movie, she’s been doing 20 minutes of midterm studying after dinner most nights. It’s not perfect: she forgot to study for a pop quiz last Wednesday and got a C, she complained for 20 minutes after rehearsal on Monday that her feet hurt. But there hasn’t been a full-blown meltdown, which is what happened the last time she had this many commitments stacked up.
I still catch myself wanting to jump in and fix things sometimes. It’s hard to stand back and let your kid carry a load that looks too big for them. But so far, this trick works better than anything I’ve tried. We’re not through the 23rd yet, but we’re getting there one checked-off item at a time.
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