First Year of High School: What No One Tells You About Transitioning (And 3 Small Things That Help)
Last Tuesday, I was leaning against my dented minivan in the high school parking lot, scrolling through grocery list notes on my phone, when my 14-year-old Lila emerged from the main entrance. Backpack slipping off one shoulder, cheeks pink, she didn’t head for the car like usual. She just stopped by the front passenger wheel and started kicking a chunk of loose asphalt back and forth.
I locked my phone and pushed off the bumper. “Everything okay?”
She kicked the rock harder. “Forgot my locker combination again. Sat in the office during lunch because I couldn’t get my sandwich out. Everyone else already has a table to sit at.”
I just opened the door, pulled out the half-eaten bag of Sour Patch Kids I’d stashed after my niece’s soccer game, and said “get in. We’ll get McDonald’s fries before we go home.” We drove around the block three times before she said anything else, just sipping her soda and picking at the candy. By the time we pulled into the McDonald’s line, she’d unloaded everything: seven different teachers each with seven different rules, one that bans smart watches and takes them if you get caught, another that collects homework in a blue bin that’s only out for the first two minutes of class, she’d missed turning in a reading sheet because she didn’t know. She can’t remember where room 214 is for biology, even after six weeks. Her new water bottle, the one with NewJeans on it she begged for before the first day, was already dented and half the cap doesn’t close.
I remember that first morning, she laid out all her matching neon highlighters on the kitchen counter, triple checked her schedule, and said she’d figured it all out. I’d been so busy worrying about her making friends and keeping up with harder classes that I didn’t think to worry about the small stuff.
A few days later, I ran into the high school guidance counselor at the grocery store, the one who used to work with me at the local elementary, and I mentioned Lila’s locker combination struggle. She laughed and said she hears the same thing from almost every first year parent this time of year. Middle school kids are used to four classes, a consistent group of peers, teachers that remind you twice about deadlines and end-of-period locker breaks. High school throws seven new locations, seven sets of expectations, and a whole new building at them in the first week. No one talks about how exhausting it is to remember a million tiny new details every single day. It’s not a big crisis. It’s just… a lot.
We tried a few small things that have actually helped, none of which involved buying a fancy new organizer or scheduling weekly parent-child check-ins that just end in eye rolls.
The first thing we do is a two-minute locker check every Sunday right after dinner. Lila writes both her regular locker and PE locker combinations on a small strip of masking tape, and sticks it inside the front cover of the school planner she’s required to carry anyway. We don’t do a whole big room cleanout or week-long schedule check. We just confirm the tape’s still stuck, restock the granola bar she keeps in the back of her locker for days when she can’t get her lunch out, and grab any gym clothes that need washing. It takes less time than brushing our teeth, and it’s cut her forgotten combination days from three a week to about once every other week.
The second change I made was ditching the “how was school today?” question. It never got me anything but a mumbled “fine” anyway. Now I ask one specific, low-stakes question every time she gets in the car: “What’s one thing that annoyed you today that wasn’t actually that big of a deal?” It’s impossible to answer with one word. Some days she says “the vending machine ate my dollar and didn’t give me my root beer.” Some days she says “my math teacher’s slides are all blurry and I can’t read them from the back.” It gives her a place to dump all those tiny annoyances before they pile up into a blowup over forgotten combinations in the parking lot. I don’t fix it most of the time. I just say “that sucks” and move on. Just getting it out is enough.
The third thing was letting her keep one unproductive, “kidish” habit from middle school that I’d been pressuring her to give up. For years, she’s read 10 pages of Dog Man comics before bed every night. I kept telling her she should be reading the assigned English novel instead, that she was too old for graphic novels about a cop who’s half dog. Then she started getting tension headaches every Sunday night, and I realized that Dog Man was the only 10 minutes of her day where her brain didn’t have to remember a locker combination or a homework deadline or a new teacher’s rule. I stopped bugging her. She still reads her Dog Man every night, the headaches went away, and she still gets her assigned reading done. It turns out she just needed 10 minutes of something familiar every day to reset.
Last week, she forgot her combination again, got to math two minutes late, and came home with an after-school detention slip. She threw it on the kitchen counter, grabbed a chocolate chip cookie from the jar, and told me about it while we added an extra strip of tape to her planner. It’s not perfect. She still misses the bus once every two weeks. She still can’t find the art room without stopping to ask someone for directions. But last month, she told me she sits with a girl from biology who also forgets her combination all the time, and they wait for the office attendant together now.
I think a lot of us go into the first year of high school expecting some big milestone moment, either amazing or terrible. Mostly it’s just a bunch of small messes, one after another, that you clean up a little bit at a time. We’re still figuring it out. Some weeks are better than others. That’s enough for me right now.
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