How letting your 9th grader choose their own first day outfit and school supplies eases the high school transition
Last Saturday, I stood in the school supplies aisle of our local Target, crumpling the printable supply list the high school emailed me a week earlier. I’d checked off every required item in my head: 5 composition notebooks, blue or black pens, a pack of 3-tab dividers, graph paper for algebra. I reached for the stack of $1 plain blue 1-inch binders, the same kind I’d bought for Lila every year of middle school, when her hand closed around my wrist.
“Not those,” she said. “I want the clear plastic ones with the glitter lining. And that canvas backpack with the pothos print, not the black one from Walmart.”
I opened my mouth to say what I always say: those are three times the price, your old backpack still zips, plain works just fine. Then I saw her shoulders tense, the way she’d been picking at the frayed edge of her hoodie all morning. She’s 14, starting 9th grade, and everything about this summer has felt like a slow unmooring from the kid she was three months ago.
I remembered my own first day of 9th grade, when my mom bought me a stiff plaid skirt because it was 75% off at the department store, even though I’d begged for the loose jeans all my friends were wearing. I sat in the back of every class that first day, pulled the skirt down over my knees every two minutes, and didn’t say a word to anyone the whole week. I never told my mom how much that skirt hung over me, how small it made me feel when everything else already felt too big and new. I didn’t tell her that I would have traded any number of school supplies for just one thing that felt like mine, that I chose.
So I closed my mouth, nodded, and stepped back. I’d talked to my friend Mara, a 9th grade counselor at the city high school a few weeks earlier, when I was complaining about how much kids care about stupid stuff these days. She’d said something that stuck with me: 9th graders don’t have a lot of control over their first year of high school. They don’t pick their teachers, their schedule, who’s in their lunch period, whether they get a locker that actually locks. The only thing they get to pick is how they present themselves, what they carry around with them. That’s not being vain. That’s claiming space.
Before we started checking out, I pulled Lila to the side and told her we had a fixed total: $80 for all supplies and any new pieces she wanted for her first day outfit. She could spend that money any way she wanted. If she wanted to pay more for fancy binders, she’d have to skip the fancy pens and get the generic pack. If she wanted new Converse, we could go thrifted for the shirt and use her babysitting money to cover half the cost. That was my non-negotiable rule, because I’m not made of money. But the choices were all hers.
She thought about it for two minutes, then crossed off the fancy pens from her mental list, agreed to buy gently used Converse off Poshmark instead of new, and we headed to the local thrift store for her shirt. She dug through the men’s section for 20 minutes and pulled out that faded Nirvana tee she’d been talking about for a month, $4, perfect. She paired it with the high-waisted jeans she’d altered herself last month, and when she tried it on at home, she stood in front of the mirror for five minutes grinning. I didn’t say anything about how it was too big, or how the graphic was peeling. It didn’t matter.
First day morning, she came down the stairs at 7:15, hair half pulled back, Converse laced perfectly, backpack slung over one shoulder. All her binders were labeled with each class in the silver glitter pen she’d dug out of her desk drawer (she’d skipped buying new ones, remembered, so it was free). She grabbed her lunch box off the counter, and before she ran out the door, she hugged me, which she hasn’t done for a school goodbye in almost a year.
I’ve talked to a lot of parents lately who roll their eyes at this stuff. They say it’s just materialism, that kids should be grateful for what they get, that school is about learning not fashion. But what I’ve realized is that these small, silly-seeming choices are actually practice for the bigger choices they’re going to have to make this year. When you let them decide what to spend their budget on, you’re telling them you trust their judgment, even when it doesn’t match yours.
If you’re on a really tight budget, you can still pull this off. Hit up the back-to-school swap at your local library, let them pick out used supplies and decorate a plain binder with stickers they already have. The cost doesn’t matter, the choice does. For teachers, it’s just as simple: don’t enforce the supply list as hard as you think you need to. If a kid shows up with a neon printed binder instead of the plain white one you asked for, it still holds paper. Let it go. That small flexibility makes a kid feel seen when everything else feels overwhelming.
This morning, I had to drop off Lila’s forgotten lunch box at the high school, ten minutes after the first bell. I found her locker easily, and I saw her leaning against the row of lockers down the hall, laughing with two girls I’d never seen before. Her pothos backpack was propped against her foot, that Nirvana tee sticking out under her denim jacket. She waved at me through the hallway window, and didn’t even pretend I wasn’t there, which is basically the biggest win you can get with a 9th grader.
I don’t know if all those glitter binders will make it to Christmas. I wouldn’t be surprised if next month she decides she hates this outfit and wants to swap it all for something else. That’s the point, isn’t it? 9th grade is all about trying on new versions of yourself, and it starts with the small stuff: a binder, a t-shirt, a pair of shoes that feel like you. Right now, that’s enough.
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