What My Kids’ Funny First Day of School Answers Actually Tell You
Last week, I sat in the car pickup line at our elementary school, my iced coffee sweating through the cup holder into the crumpled napkin I’d stuffed there, waiting for my 5th grader Lila and 2nd grader Milo to trudge out with their overstuffed backpacks and peeling paper name tags. Like every other parent on the planet, the first question out of my mouth when they clipped into their seatbelts was, “So, how was the first day?”
Lila stared out the window at a group of kids chasing each other across the lawn for 10 seconds, then said, “Fifty percent waiting for the bell, fifty percent me pretending I knew where my locker was when a 7th grader had to show me. Zero percent actual learning. So that’s a solid A, right?”
I turned to Milo, who was already digging through the granola bar stash I keep in the center console. “What about you, bug? How was your day?” He didn’t look up from his snack. “My teacher has a pet goldfish that only eats Cheerios. I gave it one out of my snack. So it’s 10 out of 10. Can we get chocolate ice cream on the way home?”
That night, my cousin who teaches 3rd grade at a different school texted our family group chat asking everyone to send their kids’ first day answers; she was collecting funny ones for her classroom bulletin board. I sent mine, then started getting replies from all my mom friends, and the responses were even more relatable and silly. A friend’s 1st grader answered, “My new shoes don’t make my feet sweat. The day was fine, I guess.” Another’s 7th grader said, “I learned if you raise your hand to go to the bathroom on the first day, everyone turns and looks. So I don’t need to learn anything else this year.” My neighbor’s kindergartener told her mom, “All the good blue crayons were taken. I’m not going back.”
We all laughed, screenshotted them, and sent them around, but I’ve been thinking about them all week because I work part-time as a paraeducator in our district’s primary grades, and I see this every year: parents see these off-the-cuff, silly, seemingly unhelpful answers and immediately panic. They think their kid hated school, or they’re not adjusting, or they’re hiding a bad experience. But the truth is, these funny, messy answers are exactly what kids are supposed to give on the first day.
The first day of school is 8 hours of nonstop new input. New classroom, new rules, new kids, new teacher, new lunch line, new bathroom, new schedule. For a kid’s brain, that’s like us trying to work a full day at a new job after pulling an all-nighter, then coming home and being asked to give a 2-minute summary of how it went. Most of the time, their working memory is so full they can only pull out one small, silly, low-stakes detail to share. That’s why it’s always the goldfish or the crayons or the locker, not the big feelings about being nervous or making a new friend.
I used to press my kids for more right after school, until a veteran teacher I worked with told me a simple trick I still use: stop asking for the big summary, meet them where they are. Instead of “how was your day,” ask “what’s the silliest thing that happened today?” That’s a low-pressure question that doesn’t require them to sort through 8 hours of chaos to give you a “good” answer. And if they give you one of those silly one-liners? Don’t push, don’t prod, don’t say “but really, how was it?” Just acknowledge it, then move on to something mundane like talking about the ice cream or what we’re having for dinner.
That day after we got ice cream and pulled into the driveway, Lila was unpacking her backpack and throwing away the stack of PTA fliers the school sent home, and 20 minutes after we left the pickup line, she just said, quiet, “I miss Ms. Henderson, my old teacher. No one sat with me at lunch today except the boy who chews gum and blows bubbles on the table. It’s weird being the oldest in the elementary school now.” That never would have come if I’d pressed her for a “real” answer in the car right after school. She used the locker joke to deflect the big, messy feeling she wasn’t ready to talk about yet.
The kindergartener who said she wasn’t going back over blue crayons is another good example. Her mom first laughed it off, texted the group that her kid was being dramatic, but after I mentioned what I’d learned, she sat down with her after dinner, pulled out a box of blue crayons from their craft bin, and said “Blue crayons are definitely the best. It’s so frustrating when all the good ones are gone.” Immediately, the kid started crying and said she didn’t know any of the other kids’ names, and she was scared to ask the teacher for anything, and the blue crayon thing was just the thing that broke her that day. It wasn’t really about crayons, it was the only thing she could name.
Right now, all the funny first day answers are taped to our fridge, next to Milo’s crayon drawing of the Cheerio-eating goldfish (which is still alive, by the way, still eating Cheerios). We still get silly answers on day five, day ten, even when school feels routine. Some days Lila says “it was fine” and that’s all I get. Some days Milo only wants to talk about the goldfish. I used to think I was doing something wrong if I didn’t get a full, detailed update every day. Now I know that the messy, funny, off-topic answers are just how kids talk when they’re processing big stuff. It’s not that they don’t want to tell you. It’s that they don’t know how to tell you yet.
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