What to Do When Your Kid Says ‘I Hate School’ Before the New Year Starts: Parenting Tips
I was folding the new pair of dark wash jeans I picked up for Leo over the weekend, his first pair without an elastic waist, when he mumbled it into his hoodie from where he was slouched on the couch. “Ugh. I hate school. It starts in a month.” The half-melted cherry popsicle he’d set on the back of the counter was dripping onto the linoleum, and his new back-to-school sneakers still sat in their plastic box by the front door. I’d spent the whole morning crossing things off my list: new backpack, notebooks, a pack of those fancy mechanical pencils he likes, and I almost snapped back the automatic thing I’d said a hundred times before: It’s not that bad, you’ll have fun once you get there.
I caught myself, though. Last spring, when he said he hated math class after a bad test, I said that exact thing. He just got up, went to his room, and didn’t talk to me for an hour. My sister, who’s a counselor at a different middle school, had told me after that that kids don’t yell “I hate everything” when everything is actually the problem. They yell that when they’ve got a bunch of small scary things piled up that they can’t untangle on their own.
I folded the top of the jeans over the hanger, wiped the popsicle drip up with a paper towel, sat down next to him, and paused his TikTok. I didn’t ask “Why do you hate school?” That question feels like an interrogation, like they have to have a big, justifiable reason for feeling bad. Instead I said, “What’s the first worst thing you think of when you think about going back? Just the first one, no need to make it make sense.”
He blinked, shrugged, and said, “Locker combinations. I forgot mine the first week of last year, and I was late to science three days in a row, and Mr. Henderson gave me a detention.” Then he kept going, before I could cut in: “And teachers always call on you when you don’t know the answer, and everyone laughs. And robotics is harder this year, everyone says you have to build a whole robot from scratch, and I’ll be the worst one and they’ll ask me to leave.”
I grabbed the back of my back-to-school list, the side that was blank, and wrote down each thing just as he said it. I didn’t add notes, I didn’t cross anything out as silly, I just wrote. When he ran out of things to say, I showed him the list and said, “Okay, these are three separate things. Let’s fix one at a time, instead of lumping them all into ‘school sucks.’”
His old locker from last year was still in the garage, leftover when the school switched to new units last spring. I dragged it into the kitchen, and we set it by the back door. We’re doing 5 minutes of combination practice every other night after dinner. No big drills, no pressure, just turn the dial, open and close it, that’s it. When we go to the school for schedule pick-up next week, we’ll get there 10 minutes early to find his new locker and practice there too, so he won’t be wandering the halls lost and panicking on the first day.
For the being called on thing, I told him the trick my sister shared with me: any kid can say “I’m not sure yet, can I come back to that?” and almost all teachers will let you move on. We practiced saying that line out loud a couple times in the kitchen, so it wouldn’t feel weird or embarrassing to say in front of the whole class. Then I told him I’d email his new homeroom teacher before the first day, just to mention he’s a little nervous about being put on the spot, so the teacher can keep that in mind when calling on students. It’s a 2-minute email, no big ask, just a heads up.
For robotics, I checked the club’s Instagram page and saw they do informal drop-in work nights all August for returning kids. We signed up for next week’s session, no pressure—he just has to show up, hang out for an hour, see what everyone’s working on. There’s no requirement to build anything or prove he’s good enough to be there.
I’ve talked to three other parents at the neighborhood playground in the last two weeks whose kids said the exact same thing: I hate school, it starts in a month. Most of the time, it’s not that they hate learning, or that they’re being bullied, or that there’s a huge ongoing problem (though of course, if the “I hate school” sticks around after the first few weeks, that’s when you dig deeper for bigger issues). It’s just that summer is predictable—you wake up when you want, hang out with your friends, no hard deadlines, no awkward first-day moments. The new school year is a whole bunch of unknowns, and it’s way easier to say “I hate it” than to untangle all the small, silly, embarrassing things that are scaring you.
The thing that surprised me most is that I didn’t have to fix all of it that day. I didn’t have to convince him school is great, or that he’s overreacting. Just getting the small fears out of his head and onto paper took a lot of the weight out of it. He didn’t suddenly turn around and say “Oh right, I love school!” He still complains about it every other day, but it’s not this big, overwhelming bad thing anymore. It’s just a list of small things we can work on, little by little, over the next month.
Last night, after we finished our first 5 minutes of locker practice, we ate ice cream on the porch. He complained again that school is stupid, and that he doesn’t want to have to wake up at 6:30 every morning. I agreed—6:30 is stupid, I don’t want to wake up that early either. Then he said he heard his best friend Javi, who moved to another state last year, might be moving back the week before school starts. He didn’t say he was excited, but he smiled when he said it. The list is still on the fridge, under a dinosaur magnet. We’ll get to everything, one step at a time. Some days will be good, some days he’ll hate it again, and that’s okay. There’s no magic fix for back-to-school jitters, just untangling the big feeling into small problems you can actually handle.
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