Back-to-school anxiety can be hard to handle -for kids and their parents. Here’s expert guidance on how to get excited instead.
I was driving my 9-year-old son to sleepaway camp early one summer when the questions started coming hard and fast from the middle row of the minivan:
“Mom, how long is camp?”
“When I get out of camp, how long will I have until school starts?”
“How many days is that?”
“How long will I be at home before school starts again?”
It took me a while to understand the source of the questions. At first, I thought he was nervous about going to sleepaway camp—which didn’t make sense, since he had gone the year before and loved every minute. But after I asked him some questions of my own, I figured it out: He was, just two weeks after finishing third grade, already worrying and nervous about going back to school again in August.
Even if you aren’t familiar with the term “Sunday Scaries,” you probably know what they are: That cocktail of melancholy mixed with dread that creeps up on you sometime late on a Sunday morning and grows throughout the day, leaving you clenching your teeth or nursing an anxious stomach by nightfall as you watch the hours dwindle away toward Monday morning and the week ahead.
But it’s not just adults with jobs, mortgages, and bosses who experience the Sunday Scaries; kids feel them, too. And for some kids, the weeks (or, in my son’s case, months!) leading up to the new school year can feel like the biggest Sunday Scary of all.
Here’s how experts say parents can help their kids handle the end-of-summer scaries.
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