Why I’m Panicking About Summer Break Ending (and Low-Stress Tips to Ease the Transition)
Last night I was folding crumpled beach towels on the kitchen counter, cherry popsicle residue still sticky on the cutting board beside me, when a targeted ad for first-day-of-school sparkly dresses popped up on my phone. I froze mid-fold, my half-empty oat milk iced coffee warming by the sink, and counted back on my fingers: summer break ends in 12 days. And I’m panicking.
It’s not just the endless supply lists or the scramble for new sneakers that fit my 10-year-old’s suddenly too-big feet. This summer, we stumbled into the kind of slow rhythm I spend all school year daydreaming about. No 6:45 alarms blaring. No standing by the front door yelling that we’re going to be late if someone doesn’t find their missing math notebook right now. We stayed up till 9 most nights chasing fireflies in the backyard, ate cereal for dinner twice when we got home too late from the lake to cook, and my 7-year-old spent three straight weeks falling off her bike before she finally got the hang of riding without training wheels in the empty cul-de-sac. My 10-year-old spent three afternoons a week digging for shark teeth in the creek behind the park, and came home every day caked in mud with a pocket full of rocks I have yet to throw away.
I met my friend Lisa, a 4th grade teacher, at the playground earlier this week, and admitted I was this close to hiding all the back-to-school ads in my spam folder and just extending summer forever. She laughed through a bite of granola bar and said she feels the same panic every single year, even after 12 years of going back to the classroom. “We get used to this slow too,” she said. “It’s okay to not want to give it up.” That’s when she walked me through the small, low-effort shifts she uses with her own kids and her classroom that make the transition way less brutal for everyone. I wasn’t expecting some big life overhaul, and these weren’t that. They’ve already taken the edge off my panic, more than I thought they would.
The first thing we started doing three days ago is shifting our wake-up time 10 minutes earlier every three days, instead of waiting till the Sunday before school to jump from 8:30 wake-up to 6:45. I’d always done the big shock jump before, and the first week of school was just full of cranky kids and me yelling 10 minutes earlier every morning. This time, we just moved the alarm back 10 minutes. Day one it was 8:20, this weekend it’ll be 8:10, and by the time school starts we’ll be at 7:10, which is close enough to our school year wake-up that the shift won’t feel like a punch to the face. My 10-year-old complained once, then realized he gets an extra 10 minutes of digging in the backyard before breakfast, and hasn’t said a word since.
Next, we added one 10-minute low-stakes structured activity to the end of breakfast, before we run off to do whatever summer thing we have planned. It’s not homework, it’s just getting used to pausing for a few minutes before jumping into play. My 7-year-old gets to write three words or draw one picture of whatever she wants that morning. My 10-year-old reads two pages of his fossil book out loud to our golden retriever. If they want to draw a picture of our cat instead of practicing writing, that’s fine. The point isn’t to get them caught up on math, it’s just to build a small routine of stopping and focusing for a few minutes, so it doesn’t feel totally foreign when they have to do it for 6 hours a day. We still leave right after for the beach or the creek, so we don’t lose the rest of our summer fun before it’s even over.
The third thing that surprised me is that we started talking about the scary parts of back to school first, instead of only gushing about how fun it’s going to be. I’d always defaulted to “You’re gonna see your best friend! It’s gonna be so fun!” when my kids brought up worries, but that just made them stop talking. Lisa taught me to just name the worry instead of fixing it right away. When my 7-year-old mumbled that she didn’t want to go back because she was scared her new teacher wouldn’t let her go to the bathroom when she needed to, I said “I remember standing outside my third grade classroom and worrying no one would save me a seat at lunch. That feels terrible, doesn’t it?” instead of telling her it would be fine. She immediately started crying and told me all her other worries, and that was that. We wrote all the worries and all the fun things on a big sheet of paper and stuck it on the fridge. It didn’t make the worries go away, but it made all of us stop pretending everything is fine when it’s not. I even wrote down one of my worries: “I’m scared I’ll forget my daughter’s epi-pen in her backpack on field trips.” It felt good to get it out.
The last thing I’m doing that’s helping is I’m keeping one summer ritual through the entire first month of school, instead of cutting all fun out to “get into the routine.” We’re keeping our Friday night firefly and popsicle night. No early bed, no homework, no packing backpacks that night until after we’re done. That way I don’t feel like I lost all the slow, good stuff of summer the second the first bell rings. We still get that one night a week to just be us, no schedules.
I still have moments of panic. Yesterday I stared at the school supply list for 10 minutes wondering who needs 12 glue sticks in second grade, and why a 10-year-old needs a 3-inch binder for fifth grade. I still catch myself driving past the creek and feeling a tightness in my chest, like I’m wasting the last good days of summer. The first week is still going to be messy: there will be forgotten lunches, after-school meltdowns, and at least one morning I’ll forget to pack my own coffee and have to stop at the gas station.
But the panic isn’t the all-consuming thing it was two weeks ago. I don’t have to rush summer out the door to get ready for school. We can adjust slowly, and bring a little of the slow with us when we go back. Some days it’ll still feel messy, and that’s okay. This transition isn’t supposed to be perfect. It just has to work for us.
Please indicate: Thinking In Educating » Why I’m Panicking About Summer Break Ending (and Low-Stress Tips to Ease the Transition)