August Feeling Overwhelming? It May Be Back-to-School Scaries

I was at Target when it hit me.

Dreading back to school? Maybe it's the Back-to-School Scaries. Here's what to do about them.

Source: ksenija18kz/123RF

The bright Crayola bins. The towering stacks of composition notebooks. The “Let’s Do This, Parents!” signs cheerfully cheering me on.

And I got mad.

Not sentimental. Not overwhelmed. Not wistful. Mad.

Mad that the season of loosely structured days and fewer transitions was ending. Mad that my nervous system was about to be hit with the full weight of school-year demands again—the tight schedules, the multitasking, the constant need to manage competing priorities. Summer might not be restful, but it’s less relentless.

At first, I thought I was just being cranky. But then I realized: This is the Sunday Scaries. Except it’s August. And it’s worse.

What are the Sunday Scaries?

The Sunday Scaries are that well-known wave of dread that rolls in around 4 p.m. on Sunday, when the weekend’s freedom starts slipping away and the Monday morning rush creeps back in. It’s the anticipation of structure, performance, and unpredictability that makes us want to hit pause, even if we love our jobs or have a perfectly functional adult routine.

Now multiply that by a hundred. Stretch it across school supply lists, open house emails, bus schedules, new teachers, and the creeping suspicion that everyone else is excited while you’re quietly panicking.

That’s the Back-to-School Scaries.

And if you’re a post-traumatic parent, it doesn’t just feel heavy. It feels dangerous.

In my book Post-Traumatic Parenting, I describe the trauma app as a metaphor for how trauma lives in our brains. It's not just a memory, it’s a full behavioral algorithm. The trauma app runs silently in the background, always scanning for danger, always trying to keep life small, safe, and predictable. It’s the part of us that thinks survival lives in routine, and that any disruption, no matter how developmentally normal, feels like a threat.

And nothing disrupts predictability like the first day of school.

Suddenly, our children are back out in the world, riding buses, walking hallways, navigating teachers and friends and strangers, and we are no longer the ones keeping them safe. Even if we trust the school, even if our kids are doing fine, the trauma app doesn’t care. It just sees risk. Unpredictability. Powerlessness. It has can warn us of multiple threats, a sort of "Choose Your Own Adventure" of things to worry about, from mean teachers and academic challenges to school shootings and global pandemics.

And so the dread creeps in.

The Structure Conundrum

This is the Back-to-School version of the Sunday Scaries. But it’s Sunday Scaries on steroids. Because for post-traumatic parents, structure isn’t just stressful. It’s a trigger.

We may want structure. We may even crave it. But when the school year starts, everything shifts at once—bedtimes, wake times, drop-offs, lunch boxes, forgotten water bottles, missed field trip forms. The pace speeds up, the margin for error disappears, and we lose the ability to keep things slow and manageable. The trauma app equates that with danger.

You might feel irritable. Snappy. Frustrated that everyone around you seems excited for the new school year while you’re dreading it. You’re not lazy or ungrateful or “just bad at transitions.” You’re a post-traumatic parent. And this is what transition feels like when your brain learned long ago that unpredictability = unsafety.

So what helps?

1. Name what’s happening.
“This is the trauma app flaring. It’s trying to keep things small and controllable.” Saying this out loud—even quietly to yourself—helps you mentalize the experience instead of being swallowed by it.

2. Shrink the timeline.
Don’t think about the whole semester. Just focus on getting through the first 30 minutes of the first day. Your nervous system doesn't need a master plan—it needs anchoring.

3. Use a transitional ritual.
Light a candle after drop-off. Make the same cup of tea. Put on the same music. Your body doesn’t know it’s safe until you show it through repetition.

4. Give your inner child a role.
When the panic rises, remind yourself: Your inner child can’t raise a child. But raising your real-world child can help heal her. Your inner child can provide some advice and insight into parenting your real-world children, but ultimately, you get to decide what actions to take. Let your inner child know, you want to hear what it has to say, and then you'll take over.

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Parenting is an opportunity to rewire our trauma. It asks us to send our kids out into a bigger, messier world, even while our trauma app pleads for smaller, safer spaces. The more we expand our lives, the more we can heal from our trauma. That doesn't mean it's easy.

But this is the work. And you’re doing it.

Even if you’re doing it from the Target aisle, muttering about pencil cases.

(c) Robyn Koslowitz, 2025