It is the second week of August, we are currently in Switzerland enjoying our last leg of our summer holiday, and I am well and truly getting the itch to PLAN. September is my January. I create a weekly schedule for the kids on my super-sized kitchen whiteboard, of course I'll get myself new personalised stationary, a new to-do list, I'll re-do the schedule on my current family planning app Time Tree, whilst scouring the app store for better alternatives because I tell myself every year things could be done better and there has to be a more efficient app out there.
I love a good back to school. I love it in the way that women who love January love January - the fresh notebook, the cleared drawer, the promise of a version of yourself who plans meals on Sunday and does not need to run to the grocery store until the following Sunday. Every August in Dubai the whole city seems to enter into a collective agreement to reset. The influencers post their bedtime routines. The mothers I know are laminating things. There is a specific kind of shopping being done, a specific kind of list being written, a specific pen being purchased in the belief that this year, it will be different.
Here is what really hit me though as I thought about all of the things I need to do when I get back home. Almost none of that preparation is actually for the children, it is for me.
My kids do not need the colour-coded schedule, they need me to be less agitated when they cannot find their shoes. They do not need the perfectly stocked lunchbox rotation, they need me to stop checking my phone while I am packing it. What my children are absorbing in the last two weeks of August is not the reassurance of a well-planned September. It is the low hum of a mother who is quietly panicking and calling it preparation.
The research on how children handle transitions is genuinely humbling if you actually read it. Young children do not regulate their own nervous systems - they borrow ours. A settled parent produces a settled child. A stressed parent produces a stressed child. And the stress does not stay hidden just because you are smiling through it. Suniya Luthar, who has spent decades at Columbia and Arizona State studying children of high-achieving parents, keeps landing on the same finding: it is not the level of enrichment or the sophistication of the routine that predicts how a child fares. It is the emotional availability of the primary caregiver. The state of the parent, not the sophistication of the plan.
Which means the laminated schedule is not neutral - it has a cost. If I build it in a state of anxiety and then present it in a state of relief, my child does not experience the schedule, my child experiences the mother.
I am not going to stop making the schedule. Let us be clear about that. I like the schedule. The schedule is a form of self-soothing that I have every intention of continuing. What I am trying to do is stop pretending it is for them. Because the moment I admit that back to school is my personal reset - my acceptable January in August, my socially sanctioned excuse to buy new pens and try to become a slightly better version of myself - a strange thing happens, the pressure lifts a little. I stop trying to convince my children they need to feel excited about a new pencil case. I stop asking my son whether he has "thought about how he feels" about Year 4. I let him be a boy who is mostly interested in whether we have grapes.
What actually helps them, from everything I have read and from watching my own three do this six times over now, is not the sophistication of the routine. It is the boringness of it. Same wake-up. Same breakfast. Same me. A parent who is genuinely calm rather than performatively organised. A house that feels like the same house it was in July.
The September I am planning is for me. And just admitting that feels quietly revolutionary.
Wishing everyone reading this safe travels back home if you are away, and a September that has all the January feels - new systems, same you.
With love,
Roshni
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