Jessica Parenting Journal

  My daughter came home from her first day of school, sat down at the kitchen table with her afternoon snack, and fell asleep sitting up. Half-eaten apple slice still in her hand. She was out before I could ask a single question. My immediate thought was that something must have gone terribly wrong. My second thought was that she was coming down with something. What I know now: nothing was wrong at all. Her brain had just done one of the most demanding things it had ever been asked to do — and it needed to recover. The first day of school looks, from the outside, like a social event. A bit overwhelming, a bit exciting, probably some tears at the gate. What it actually is, neurologically, is a sustained multi-system activation event that runs from the moment of goodbye to the moment of collapse on the kitchen floor. Understanding what’s happening inside that small head doesn’t just satisfy curiosity — it changes what you do at the gate, what you say after school, and what you stop...

  I still remember standing in the lobby of the third preschool open day in two weeks, brochure in hand, nodding along while the director explained their “child-centred, holistic approach to emergent learning.” It sounded wonderful. It sounded exactly like the brochure from the previous two schools. And I had absolutely no idea what any of it would look like on an actual Tuesday morning, with my actual child, doing actual things. That was the moment I realised I needed a framework before I could make this decision. Not more open days. A way of understanding what these methods actually mean in practice — and which one might suit the specific small person currently destroying my living room with remarkable efficiency. I spent the next several weeks reading, visiting, and talking to parents on the other side of the decision — parents whose children had been through each of these environments and were now in primary school. What I found surprised me: the differences between the met...

  My sister-in-law Karen has a daughter, Hannah, who is twenty-four now — employed, living independently, and, by her own cheerful admission, permanently one surprise expense away from disaster. She’s still on the family phone plan and the family health plan, and every month is a small financial cliffhanger. Here’s the thing I can’t stop thinking about: Hannah, whom I love dearly, once had the single most catastrophic bedroom in our extended family. I’m not saying the bedroom caused anything. I’m saying I’ve stopped believing it was a coincidence. This is the post where I connect two things I’ve been writing about separately for a year: the messy teenager and the boomerang young adult. Because the more I read, the more convinced I become that they’re not two topics. They’re one topic, ten years apart. The Boomerang Numbers, Revisited I wrote about the boomerang generation before, and the economic picture I described then has not improved. If anything, the newest numbers are m...