Why I Hate the End of the School Year (And What Helps When Everyone’s Tapped Out)
Last Tuesday, I pulled up to the elementary school pickup line two minutes early, iced coffee sweating through the paper cup onto my jeans, and found my 10-year-old sitting on the curb with her backpack unzipped. Half a dozen loose worksheets skittered across the blacktop toward the street, and when she spotted me, she stood up and yelled, “I hate everything. I’m not coming back tomorrow.”
I didn’t argue. I’ve been here before, both as a mom and a former first grade teacher. I got out, grabbed the stray worksheets, and heaved her backpack into the back of the car. By the time we pulled into the driveway at home, she was already picking a fight with her 7-year-old brother over who got the first popsicle, and by the time we got inside, she’d crumpled her end-of-year memory book project (due Friday) into a ball and thrown a crayon at the fridge.
I used to think this sort of outburst was just kids being brats, or me being a bad parent for letting them get overtired. Ten years in, I know better. I hate the end of the school year too. The cute countdown chalkboards and first-last day photo ops everyone posts online never match what actually happens: the routine that held your family together for nine months gets ripped apart piece by piece, assemblies cancel recess, half the assignments are half-hearted busy work, teachers are just as tired as everyone else, and every kid I’ve ever known is quietly spinning out over the small and big changes no one talks about.
Last year, my older son got sent to the office for arguing with the P.E. coach during field day. Everyone called him a sore loser. That night, over cereal for dinner, he admitted he was scared half his friends wouldn’t be in his class next year, and he didn’t want to leave his math teacher who’d finally figured out how to help him with his dyslexia. He’d been holding that fear in for three weeks, and it all came out over a disputed tug-of-war call.
That’s the thing no one tells you about the end of the school year: transitions don’t feel exciting for most kids. They feel destabilizing. Every small unspoken rule they’ve gotten used to—where they sit at lunch, who they walk to class with, how their teacher reminds them to turn in homework—gets packed into a cardboard box and taken away. It’s normal that all that uncertainty comes out as yelling over crayons or fights over tug-of-war. It’s not bad behavior. It’s just stress.
Over the years, I’ve figured out a few small things that work better than telling everyone to “just hold on a little longer.” The first is the two-minute chaos check every afternoon in the car. I go first, and I name one stupid, frustrating thing that happened to me that day: “Today I forgot my grocery list and had to drive back to the store twice, and the barista put sugar in my coffee even though I asked for no sugar.” Then each kid has to name one thing that felt messy or unfair that day. It doesn’t get fixed right there, but it stops all the small frustrations from piling up into a big blow up over a crumpled memory book. Most days, my daughter just says “Ms. Lee made us clean out our desks and I lost my favorite eraser” and that’s it. It’s out.
The second thing is I cut expectations instead of demanding everyone push through. I used to say “it’s only two more weeks, just finish your work” but that just makes kids feel like their exhaustion doesn’t matter. Now, if a project is due and my kid can’t get through it one night, I email the teacher and say “She’s tapped out, can she turn in half tomorrow and the rest Friday?” In 10 years of doing this, I’ve only had one teacher say no. Most teachers are just as tapped out as we are, and they don’t care that much about a perfect memory book. I also cut one extra activity the last two weeks—we skip one soccer practice, we don’t force 20 minutes of reading before bed if they just want to sit and watch old SpongeBob episodes. The world doesn’t end if we let things slide a little.
For the big, scary unknowns of next year, I do one tiny concrete thing instead of giving a pep talk. I used to say “you’ll love your new teacher, it’ll be so much fun” which just feels like a lie to a kid who’s scared. Now, if we have the new teacher’s name, we write a one-sentence note: “I like drawing dinosaurs and I’m nervous about fifth grade.” We drop it in the mail. If we can, we drive by the new school building once after pickup, get a snow cone, and walk around the playground for 10 minutes. It’s a small connection, and it takes a little of the edge off the unknown.
After the crayon incident last Tuesday, we left the memory book on the table, got in the car, and drove to the snow cone stand down the road. We sat on a park bench and ate blue raspberry that stained our fingers, and my daughter told me her best friend was moving at the end of the week, and she didn’t want to finish the memory book because her friend wouldn’t be there to sign it. I didn’t tell her she’d make new friends, or that they’d still text. I just said “That sucks. End of the year is stupid when it takes the people you like away.”
We went home later, and she added a blank page at the back of the memory book just for her friend’s signature. It’s not perfect. We still have 10 minutes of yelling every morning over who forgot their lunch box, and we’re all in bed by 7:30 most nights. I don’t think I’ll ever love the end of the school year. But these small things make it bearable. It doesn’t have to be cute, it doesn’t have to be fun. It just has to get done. And that’s enough for right now.
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