Are You Happy Your Kids Are Back in School? Candid Thoughts for Parents With Mixed Feelings
My socks were still damp from walking the dog through dewy grass when I leaned against my kitchen counter last week, 20 minutes after dropping my 8- and 10-year-old off for their first day of school. The coffee I’d poured was still hot, no one had spilled orange juice on my laptop, and the only sound was the hum of the refrigerator. My best friend texted three minutes later: Isn’t this the best? I’ve counted down for months. Are you so happy they’re back?
I stared at the text for a full minute, thumb hovering over the keyboard. I couldn’t type “yes!” I couldn’t type “no!” Both felt wrong.
Summer was messy this year. We had three camping trips that all went sideways: one got rained out after two hours, one my son pulled a tick off his ankle mid-hike, one we forgot the entire cooler of food at home. I broke up more sibling fights in July than I did the entire first half of the year, and I yelled so many times about putting shoes on to leave the house that I lost my voice for two days. By the last week of break, I was checking the calendar every night to count how many sleep downs until school started.
But summer was also the kind of messy I know I’ll miss in 10 years. My daughter learned to ride her bike without training wheels on our bumpy block, and we got ice cream every time she made it to the stop sign without falling. We stayed up until 9:30 three nights a week catching fireflies in the backyard, and she read her entire first chapter book out loud to me while we sat on the porch, no bell ringing to pull us away to reading group or math time. Some days we didn’t get dressed until after noon, and no one had anywhere to be.
I scrolled through the local parent group that morning after that text, and every other post was the same thing: Freedom! Best day of the year! I’ve never been happier. I felt a little twist of guilt, like I was broken for not feeling that all the way through. I called my sister, who’s a third grade teacher at our neighborhood elementary, and she laughed before I even finished explaining.
She said she sees this every single year. Parents come in on the first day, one of two extremes: either bragging about how they’re going to go take a three hour nap and eat lunch alone, or crying in the parking lot because they can’t believe their baby is growing up. And almost all of them, when she gets them one on one for a quick chat, admit it’s not that simple. Most people are carrying two feelings at once. You can be relieved to get your routine back and sad summer is over. You can be happy your kid is back with their friends and exhausted from two months of nonstop caregiving. You can be a parent who can’t wait for quiet afternoons to get work done and still miss the random midday ice cream runs.
She told me the worst part is the unspoken rule that you have to pick one feeling. If you say you’re happy your kids are back, people assume you don’t love being with them. If you say you’re sad summer’s over, people assume you hate structure and can’t handle a schedule. Neither is true.
We talked about small, concrete things you can do to make the transition easier on everyone, no matter how you feel. If you’re like me and you have mixed feelings, you don’t have to force yourself to be overly joyful or overly sentimental. One small shift I started doing this week is changing how I greet the kids after school. Instead of opening with “Did you have a good day? Did you learn anything?” I just say, “I missed you today, and I got a lot done while you were gone.” It acknowledges both parts of how I feel, and it doesn’t make my kids feel like I’m glad to be rid of them, or like I’m so sad without them that they have to comfort me. That’s a tiny phrase change that makes a big difference.
If you’re feeling sad that summer’s over and you’re not as happy as everyone says you should be, schedule a 10 minute no-agenda check-in right after school every day for the first two weeks. It doesn’t require any fancy planning: just sit on the couch with them while they eat their after-school snack, don’t check your phone, don’t bring up homework or forms that need to be signed, and just listen to whatever they want to talk about. I did that this Monday, and my son ranted for 12 full minutes about how his locker is too high for him to reach the top shelf, and that’s all he needed. He didn’t want me to go to the school and fix it, he just wanted to get it out. I also started blocking off 10 minutes every Friday after school to do one small thing we did all summer: last week we got ice cream on the way home, this week we’re going to catch fireflies before dinner. It’s a tiny thing that doesn’t disrupt the new school routine, but it softens that ache of summer ending.
If you are one hundred percent happy your kids are back, that’s okay too. Just a small shift in how you talk about it: instead of saying “I’m so ready to get these kids out of my house,” you can say “I’m really ready for a regular routine this year.” It doesn’t make other parents who feel differently wrong for loving their summer break.
Today I picked the kids up, they dumped their backpacks on the kitchen rug, spilled an entire bag of goldfish crackers all over the floor, and started fighting over who got the last popsicle. I cleaned it up, and after dinner we sat on the porch for 10 minutes before bedtime. I still have the same mixed feelings I had on the first day. I’m looking forward to finishing my work project this week without constant interruptions, and I already miss the slow mornings where we didn’t have to run for the bus. No one talks about how normal that is. There’s no right way to feel about back to school. It’s okay to be happy, it’s okay to be sad, it’s okay to be both. Right now, I’m going to go fold the pile of school uniforms that’s been sitting on the couch, and tomorrow I’ll pack their lunches again. That’s just how it is this year.
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