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.

If a teenager types “anxiety” into social media today, they may encounter a licensed psychologist before they encounter a friend. That is a remarkable cultural shift. Mental health language that once lived primarily in counseling offices and psychology textbooks is now available in sixty second videos, captions, comment sections, and algorithmically generated feeds. In some ways, that accessibility can be a gift, especially for a young person who has never heard anyone put language around what they are experiencing. But the speed with which kids can acquire psychological vocabulary creates a new parenting challenge: knowing the word for something is not the same as receiving help for it.