A child watches one video about a game, a celebrity, a sport, a style, or an idea, and suddenly the internet seems convinced it’s the most important thing in their life. One video becomes fifty, and within a few days the feed feels less like a collection of options and more like a world that has been custom built around one interest. Adults experience this too. Search for one product or pause on one video long enough, and suddenly similar content appears everywhere. What feels like personalization can become something much more formative when the person on the other side of the screen is still figuring out who they are.

Back to school anxiety can show up in remarkably ordinary places. It is there when a child suddenly cannot find the shoes that were sitting beside the door five minutes ago or when the kid who seemed perfectly fine Sunday night develops a stomachache Monday morning. Some of that is simply the cost of changing rhythms after a long summer. But for younger children especially, this school year may be asking them to use relational and learning muscles that did not develop under ordinary circumstances. Some of today's youngest students spent formative early years in pandemic disruption, with more family time and fewer opportunities to practice the social rhythms of a classroom. So when a child says, “I don't want to go,” the question may not be how quickly we can eliminate the anxiety, but what the anxiety is trying to tell us.

There is a stage of parenting when getting down on the floor with a child feels completely natural. Matchbox cars appear everywhere, blocks cover the carpet, somebody wants to build a train track across the living room, and you somehow become the voice of three stuffed animals before breakfast. Then the kids get older, we get busier, our knees get less cooperative, and play begins to change. Sitting beside a child while they play can start to feel like enough, especially if we are also answering a message or keeping half an eye on something else. But one of the most encouraging ideas in a recent Celebrate Kids Podcast conversation was that kids may not need hours of elaborate play. Sometimes ten fully present minutes can communicate more than an hour of distracted coexistence.