Why Kids Feel Kind of Nervous About Next Month (And Small Things That Actually Help)
I was folding laundry last Tuesday night, my 10-year-old Mia was cross-legged on the bedroom floor matching socks, when she said it so quiet I almost missed it over the rerun of The Great British Baking Show playing on my laptop: “I’m kind of nervous about next month.”
I was mid-fold of my husband’s frayed flannel, and the first thing that popped into my head was the standard pep talk: It’s gonna be fine! You’re gonna love 5th grade. But I caught myself. I’d pulled that same line on my older son two years ago, when he mumbled he was kind of nervous about starting middle school. I brushed it off, told him he’d make tons of friends, and he didn’t bring it up again until he had a panic attack before his first math test, two weeks into the semester. That’s the thing about this quiet, offhand nervousness—if you brush it off, it doesn’t go away. It just hides.
I sat down on the carpet next to the mismatched sock pile and said, “What’s the part that’s got you twisted up?” She picked at a hole in the toe of her favorite unicorn sock, and started listing all the small things that add up: 5th grade is in the upper elementary wing, all the way across the school from the room she’s had for three years. Her best friend Lila got placed in a different homeroom. Her new teacher posts all assignments on Google Classroom, and she still messes up her iPad login half the time. The worst part, though, was the locker. She fumbled the combination three times at orientation, and a 6th grader behind her sighed and said “c’mon” really loud, and she wanted to disappear.
I didn’t tell her the 6th grader was being rude, didn’t say she’d get the hang of it in a week, didn’t promise she’d make a new best friend in homeroom. I just said, “That sounds so embarrassing. I’d feel weird about that too.” That’s it. No big speech, no problem-solving yet. Just letting the feeling sit.
We remembered we had an old school lock from when my son was in 5th grade, tucked in a junk box in the garage. We dug it out, wrote the combination on a scrap of cardstock, taped it to the bathroom mirror, and decided we’d practice once a night for two minutes after brushing our teeth. That’s all. No 30-minute practice drills, no role-playing meeting new friends, no big “how to survive 5th grade” talk. Just one small thing we could fix right now.
I used to think that if a kid was nervous about something a whole month away, it was my job to get rid of the nervousness before the big day. I thought if they still felt jittery when the month started, I’d failed somehow. But I worked as a preschool aide for five years before I had kids, and I’ve had two of my own for 10 and 12 years now. That quiet “kind of nervous” about next month is almost never about a big crisis. It’s all the small unknowns piling up. Kids don’t have decades of experience getting through new things like we do. To them, the whole stretch of next month is just a blank page, and every small unanswerable question—Will I find the bathroom? Will anyone sit with me at lunch? Does the new teacher like Minecraft?—adds a little weight until it slips out as an offhand comment while they’re matching socks.
I was at the neighborhood playground last weekend, and another mom I know mentioned her 7-year-old Jax is nervous about starting rec soccer next month. He’s never played on a team before, and all the other kids know each other from last year. She’d been giving him pep talks for weeks, telling him he’s a great runner, he’ll make friends, but he still brings it up out of the blue sometimes, when they’re driving to school. I told her what we were doing with Mia’s lock, and she tried it the next Saturday: they drove past the soccer fields after grocery shopping, pointed out which field was his, stopped for blue raspberry slushies on the way home. She got him a $5 ball from Walmart, and they kick it back and forth for 10 minutes after dinner every night. She told me he hasn’t moped about it since. He still says he doesn’t know if he’ll like it, but that’s it—no more tight shoulders when someone mentions soccer practice.
The thing that works for us, almost every time, is to pick one tiny, concrete thing to fix instead of trying to fix the whole feeling of nervousness. If your kid is nervous about starting daycare next month, have the new caregiver come over for an hour of play this week, don’t give a two-hour pep talk. If they’re nervous about a big school trip next month, help them pack their backpack once this weekend with the snacks they want to bring. You don’t have to answer every question or iron out every unknown. Just give them one small thing that feels familiar, one thing they can practice or see or touch right now, to cut that big, scary blank month down to size. It’s also okay to let them keep the nervousness. I told Mia I’m kind of nervous about my sister’s wedding next month, because I have to give a toast in front of 100 people. I said I still got nervous before every first day of school when I was a kid, even when I knew it would be fine. Nervous doesn’t mean bad, it just means you care how it goes.
Last night, Mia got her locker combination right three times in a row, high-fived me in the bathroom mirror, and then said, “I’m still kind of nervous, you know.” I wiped toothpaste off the sink and said, “I know. That’s okay.” She stuffed her practice lock in her backpack, ran out to watch TikTok on the couch, and that was the end of the conversation.
Next month will come. She’ll probably forget her combination once or twice the first week. She’ll probably find a new spot to sit at lunch that she likes even better than the old one. She’ll have a good day and a rainy, bad day, just like every other month. The nervousness didn’t disappear, but it doesn’t have to. We did the small thing we could do, and that’s enough for now.
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