The first day of school can feel like freedom and heartbreak in the same breath. You may feel sad that your kids are growing up, worried about how they’ll adjust, relieved to have some time to yourself—and then guilty for feeling relieved. In this episode of the Leadership Parenting Podcast, I’m talking about how to handle back-to-school emotions without mom guilt. I’ll explain why parenting transitions can feel so emotional, why your brain and nervous system react strongly to change, and why feeling guilt doesn’t necessarily mean you’ve done something wrong. I’ll also give you four simple emotional regulation tools to help you calm your body, understand what you’re feeling, stop judging yourself for having mixed emotions, and move through motherhood transitions with more confidence. Because being a resilient mom doesn’t mean having the “right” feelings. It means learning how to hold more than one feeling at a time and keep going.
And if you’re wondering how to help your child through the transition, I’ve created a free Back to School With Confidence: The Five Core Needs Kids Have During Transitions workshop to give you a practical plan for supporting them, available for free through September.
What you will learn in this episode
- Transitions bring several feelings at once, and they do not take turns.
- Your brain runs on prediction, so even a change you wanted reads as disruption.
- “The accounting” is judgment, not memory.
- Change one word and both feelings get to stay true.
- Guilt is not proof that you did something wrong.
The Back to School Workshop
This episode was about you. The workshop is about them. It walks you through what your child is carrying into a new school year, what to watch for in the first few weeks, and what to do when you start seeing it.
Help Your Kids Back to School!
**Free through September 30th 2026
Transcript
The hardest part of back to school season might not be anything that’s happening to your child. It might actually be the thing that you’re feeling standing in your kitchen after the bus pulls away. This is Leadership Parenting, How to Handle Your Back-to-School Emotions Without Mom Guilt.
Did you know that resilience is the key to confidence and joy? As moms, it’s what we want for our kids, but it’s also what we need for ourselves. My name is Leigh Germann. I’m a therapist and I’m a mom. Join me as we explore the skills you need to know to be confident and joyful, and get ready to teach these skills to your kids. This is Leadership Parenting, where you learn how to lead your family by showing them the way.
Welcome back to Leadership Parenting. I’m so glad you’re here with me today.
A Quick Note About Last Week’s Links
Before we get started, a quick note. If you listened to last week’s episode, number 157, and went looking for the workshop and the listening list that I promised you, they were not up yet. We had a little glitch, but they are now. So you can head back to the show notes for episode 157 at LeighGermann.com under podcasts, and you’ll find both of those waiting for you.
And while you’re there, you can check the show notes for today’s episode 158 on transitioning back to school. Today we’re going to talk about moms, but I wanted to have something for you to help you guide your children through that back to school transition. So check those show notes for episode 158.
Okay, let’s get to our topic for today.
Your First Day Back to School
Today, we’re talking about back to school. For you. How it affects you as a mom.
Because do you ever see all your kids out the door, especially with those first days of school coming, and close the door behind them, and then just kind of stand there for a minute? And the house is quiet in a way that it hasn’t been since school got out in June. And the whole day’s in front of you that you’ve been waiting for for weeks, because you know it’s chaotic during the summer. And instead of feeling great, you might be feeling something that you can’t quite name. A little bit of sadness. And then right underneath that, something that feels a lot like relief.
And the relief is often the part that we don’t really talk about. I mean, of course, there’s some of us that are very clear about I’m so glad kids are going back to school. But I also know a lot of moms that are so mixed in their feelings about that.
And I want to talk not just about your child’s first day, but about yours.
Because here’s what I think happens every single August, September. We put all of our attention on getting kids ready. The supply list, the shoes that fit. Trying to move our bedtimes back an hour or two to get kids ready, get their little bodies ready for getting up early, which is really hard, isn’t it, to try to get that schedule going before we’re actually in it. All of those things we’re doing, trying to prepare our children. And I’m hearing from the moms that I work with that there’s another layer of stuff that’s happening inside of them.
Crying in the Parking Lot
I was just working with a mom this week. Her school started crazy early. Isn’t it shocking? I don’t know if it’s shocking to you guys. To me, it’s really early to start school like the second week of August. But that’s what’s happening in a lot of our schools.
And so she dropped her kids off that first day, and she and I met right after that. And she said she just cried in her car in the school parking lot. Not just a few tears, but that really messy crying, the kind where you have to wait before you could drive because you really can’t see.
And what she wanted to talk about was all the stuff around the crying. She wasn’t embarrassed that she cried. I think she kind of expected that she would have a little bit of loss. And you’ll understand when I tell you that she had a kindergartner that was starting. So it was that pull, her little five-year-old, newly five-year-old by the way, going into school away from her all those hours. And she’d been home with him for five years and now she wasn’t going to be. And she was feeling this really hard to explain feeling, because she didn’t really want to keep him home. He was ready. She couldn’t explain why she was feeling so sad about that.
And then what made it a little bit tricky for her was that once she calmed down, she went to the grocery store, and she went in and she got a drink and she came back out of the grocery store, and she sat in the parking lot and all of a sudden started to feel so much better than she’d felt even in the last year. She said, I felt like it was whiplash. Like I was so sad that he was gone, but I was so relieved that I had some time, and that the schedule was going to be a little bit more on my schedule now that there was a school schedule in place.
And she said, what’s wrong with me? I cried about him and then I was glad that he was gone. And I feel so guilty about it.
Well, I think this was such a little microcosm of what I’m hearing from moms everywhere I go, from my daughters to the clients that I’m working with. I think a lot of us are sitting in that parking lot right now having those feelings.
And I’m going to put a name on it. I’m going to say that those are feelings that come for us when we’re in the middle of transitions. And transitions don’t bring us just one feeling. They’re actually several feelings arriving at the same time, and they often don’t even fairly take turns.
You know, I have such a tender heart, borderline emotional basket case when it comes to transitions. I can just hardly stand that my kids are growing up. And I was talking to my daughter about her little guy who’s going into first grade this year, and how much she and I were just kind of like, our hearts are squeezing. We wanted to keep him little. And we even started talking about what homeschooling would look like, right? The pros and cons of it. And then we just realized that there really wasn’t a problem with him going to school. It was just that she was having the bittersweet feeling of literally watching him grow up one more year.
I couldn’t help but remember when my youngest was going to kindergarten. That first day I was a mess. She was the last of my five kids. This was the first time for me in over 15 years that I’d have a handful of hours all to myself during the day when everyone was at school. And I thought it was going to be like this huge amount of time. And I think any mom knows that those school hours go by so fast.
But on paper, I should have been really excited. And I wasn’t. I was crying all morning. And my husband was just baffled, because he knew how much I needed that time to myself, and we’d been kind of hanging on by a thread waiting for this day, because I was going off of very small amounts of alone time. But here I was, so upset.
I said to him, this is the beginning of the end. I was so dramatic. But in a way, it was so true. He tried to convince me that I had 13 more years of raising this girl, and I did, but all I could see that day was the future loss of her in my home. I didn’t want her to stay home that year. She was ready to go. I was ready. It was the right thing. But there were so many feelings all at once.
And then fast forward 13 years, and I’m standing in my husband’s office when my daughter is away at college, crying, saying, this, this is what I was talking about. Her room is empty. All the kids are out of the house. Yes, they’re thriving, which he reminded me. But I felt it, that terrible, sweet, joyful, but heart-wrenching feeling.
When something ends, there’s grief. Even when the thing that ends is hard. Even when you were counting the days. Raising kids is deeply, soul-crushing difficult. But it’s also the deepest sweetness and joy we’ve ever felt.
So when we face transitions, part of us are mourning, while another part maybe is relieved that a hard season is over. We have anticipation for good things and fear of the unknown. And underneath all of it, there’s this nervous system that we have that has spent weeks and months, years in a pattern. And now we have to build a different one.
Why Transitions Feel So Big
And as you can tell, I’m expanding this beyond just summer to school transition. I’m talking about all of it.
The truth is that your brain likes to know what’s coming. It runs on familiarity and routine and prediction. And when the pattern changes, even a pattern that we want to change or that we know is good for us, some part of our system reads it as disruption and gets a little upset. That’s why transitions can feel exhausting, because we’re doing the work of adjusting. And adjusting isn’t free. It costs us something. And it’s an emotional feeling.
There’s a second thing that comes with all of this, and I call it the accounting. Do you ever find yourself going over the list of what you wanted to happen that maybe didn’t happen? That’s what I call an accounting.
Let’s go back to looking at the summer school transition. I always did this little review in my mind of the summer. The days that I meant to be more present and instead was busy doing stuff around the house or on the phone. The reading program we didn’t finish. The friends I meant to invite over in June, and now it’s the second week of August and I never did. All of it gets totaled up into one sentence that goes something like this: I missed my opportunity.
And I think that’s a subconscious sentence. And it’s not just an accurate memory of what happened. It’s judgment.
What actually happened this summer was probably hundreds of ordinary hours that we didn’t photograph, and our mind isn’t going to hand back to us when we go looking for evidence that we spent our time wisely. Instead, it’s going to hand us the things that were missing, the gaps or the spaces, places that we thought we should have done something that we didn’t do. That’s how our attention system works. And it works that way in everybody. We notice what’s missing far more than what is there.
So when you start to experience that accounting, you can ask the question: am I remembering accurately, or am I kind of judging myself or grading myself? Because if you’re judging, there’s no score or grade that would have really been good enough, because your brain is going to always look for those missing pieces. And you already know that you’ve done your best this summer, even if you’re disappointed, even if you didn’t find all of the opportunities or meet all of your goals. The truth is you did what you could do and what you felt was right.
So the question isn’t, why do I feel both these feelings, this sadness and this relief? The question is, why do we assume we’re only supposed to feel one feeling?
Somewhere along the way, I think most of us picked up the idea that feelings are supposed to be resolved. They’re supposed to all make perfect sense and line up. That if we love our kids, missing them and being glad for the quiet and the relief that you have for a few hours to yourself, that both those things can’t be true. And one of them must be the good feeling, the worthy feeling, and the other must be the one you shouldn’t feel, maybe even be embarrassed about or ashamed of.
And in moms, we almost always decide that having the relief that our kids are off to school and off on their life’s work, doing what they’re supposed to do, that that one is the one that is more shameful. Like the needing relief and needing time to yourself, that’s not worthy.
But they both are true and they both hold information. And trying to pick between them is what turns an ordinary difficult week into a week where you also feel like a bad person.
I think this gets us in transition. And I’ll add one more thing besides feeling guilty about all the things that we maybe are missing or that we’re worried about not having done. I think we also start to worry. We start to borrow trouble from the future in our imagination and think of all of the scary or harder things that could happen to our children. And then we also think about how we might feel in the future when it’s far away. Like me worrying about how I was going to feel 13 years later when my kindergartner was going to school. And then knowing that that’s rolling around in my head, kind of haunting me every time, stealing my focus from the moments that I have in person, in real time, with my child.
I’ve worked with thousands of moms. I haven’t met a mom who doesn’t have mixed feelings about things.
And here’s something that surprised me the first time I learned it many, many years ago. We don’t have to fight our feelings or struggle to not feel what we feel. For instance, you might not feel an ounce of sadness about your kids going back to school, and that’s okay. You might feel terrible grief about them leaving, and that’s okay too.
Feelings are just information. And when we put a feeling into words, and we say it out loud or we write it on paper, the intensity of that feeling actually comes down. It doesn’t have to change the situation. It just allows the feeling to settle and then dissipate. And something about naming it takes it out of the alarm part of your brain, that limbic part of your brain, and it hands it to the thinking part of your brain. And the alarm goes quiet. I don’t care what the feeling is that you’re feeling. When your alarm turns on because of it, we want your alarm to then turn off.
Guilt Is Not Proof You Did Something Wrong
So as you’re facing transitions, whether you have a child going to school for the first time, or is a veteran of going to school and they’re just returning to school, or you even have a child maybe that’s leaving your home, I want you to give yourself permission to feel what you feel.
Let me show you what that sounds like, because most of us wander around with all these big feelings and we don’t always put words to them. And that’s really helpful to do. It’s great for us to just say the parts of what we feel.
We might say, I’m so sad he’s growing up. Or, I’m so ready for school to start and get back into a routine. I’m so glad he’s ready and progressing and learning the next steps to take in his life. But I’m so relieved we’re back into a schedule and I don’t have to plan the day and entertain these kids all day. I’m grateful he’s ready to start first grade, or high school, or his first year at college, or get married and start his family. I’m missing being with him and being his mom and having that place in our family.
Notice the little words that connect all those different feelings. When we use the word but, we start to separate those things as if one is okay and one isn’t okay. Like if you say, I miss him, but I’m relieved, it’s like that second half erases the worthiness of the first half. That’s what but does. And it kind of tells you which part your brain is going to focus on most.
But if you change a word and you say and, it doesn’t do that. And lets both of those feelings, or if you have several of them, stay true at the same time. I miss him when he goes to school, and I’m so relieved that I have some time to myself.
It’s a small word and it’s doing a ton of work.
You know, I think most of us were raised on the idea that a good mother is one who’s always a little bit depleted, because it’s evidence of how much she loves and cares and works and strives. And so wanting something for ourselves, an hour or a quiet house or a morning where nobody needs anything, even a season of time where you raised your children and now you’re finally being able to focus on things that are important to you, you’ve got some time. That wanting or experiencing that can feel selfish. But nobody really says it that plainly. I hear it as women try to sort through what it is they’re really feeling. It’s a big part of where I think mom guilt comes from. And I just think it’s great for us to lay it all on the table and allow those feelings.
So here’s what I want you to notice. Whenever you have guilt, the guilt is not proof that you did something wrong. Just because you feel guilt does not mean that you deserve to feel guilt.
Guilt is really something that’s reserved, I want it to be for you, to be reserved for something that you actually did wrong, that’s an indication that you need to do something to make a change. So if you yell and you feel guilty about it, you’re going to go and repair with your child. That’s a good mechanism. But all this guilt for having feelings, not helpful at all. It’s not proof that we did something wrong. It’s pointing to something that you care about. Two different things.
Once you can tell the difference, you can let go of some of the expectations that we’re always supposed to be doing more. Our kids don’t need us to do more and more and more. They need us to just love them, engage with them, and actually be ourselves. Kids who have moms that take care of themselves and feel good about who they are, they thrive. A mom who loses herself completely in her mothering means well, but is not giving her children anything more than if she just took care of herself and loved and cared for her children.
I think you know that. I know that. But there’s this drive in us as moms, because we care so much, that keeps bringing up those feelings and those thoughts. We just have to catch them, say them out loud, and be able to see where we can tweak them so that we’re pointed back to the things that really matter to us, and we’re able to move through our life as moms without all that nasty guilt.
Four Simple Tools to Calm Your System
I want to give you a few things that you can actually use this week to help you do this.
And the first one is what I call the Awareness Box. It takes about a minute. I want you to think about a box with four quadrants. And when you notice that you’re off, right, you’re having some emotion and you can’t exactly put your finger on it, I want you to check four things. What’s my body doing? What am I feeling? What am I thinking? And what do I want to do right now?
It might be, my chest is tight, my shoulders are up. I feel sad. I’m thinking I wasted the summer. And what I want to do is go into the pantry and eat a ton of food, because maybe that’ll make me stop thinking about all of this.
I’m not even asking you not to go into the pantry. We don’t do the Awareness Box to fix things or to change emotions. But when you do this, you just moved from this vague, heavy feeling that you can’t really describe or argue with, to four simple things you can actually identify and work with. You’re catching all of that, you’re naming it. That’s the whole skill. Super simple, right? But it’s the one that will open the door for us to move forward when we’re having those big feelings.
Second thing I want you to do is really for your body. Because when you’re upset, anything that isn’t a pleasant, safe, peaceful feeling is going to turn on the alarm system in your body, and it’s going to give you tension. And I want you to be able to read that. That’s why it’s part of our Awareness Box. You’re going to be able to feel the tension in your body.
I’d love for you to put your hand where you feel whatever it is you’re feeling. It might be in your head, it might be in your shoulders. And put your feet flat on the floor and take a deep breath. If you’ve been with me, you know that that long exhale breath is what signals to your body that you’re safe. So a breath in, and then a slow exhale that runs a little longer than the inhale. And try that three or four times.
You guys, I know breath feels like it’s overemphasized. Think about what happens when you stand in your kitchen or you’re sitting in your car and you decide that you’re going to do four deliberate rounds of breathing. You’re going to put your hand on your body and you’re going to listen to yourself. And you’re going to measure that breath as you bring it in and you let it out slowly. Think about the time and attention that you’re giving yourself. How often do you get that much time and attention? Your nervous system longs for this.
That long exhale is such an important part. It tells your body that you’re safe, because your body just won’t take your word for it when you say, I’m fine. But it will listen to a long, slow exhale. It really doesn’t have a choice. It’s a nervous system mechanism that you actually have control over, like a knob or a dial in your body.
The third thing I want to tell you is to write things down. Write down the worry that you’re having. Write down the feelings that you’re having.
We know that one of the best ways that we can help somebody who’s in a transition or a change is to point out to them what is not changing. Did you know that? Think about that for a minute. You could do this with your kids. When you go to move, like move towns, what do you tell your child? You’ll be like, yep, we’ll be in a different house. Yes, it’ll be a different school. But guess what? We’ll still be our family. We’ll still bring your toys. You’ll still have so many things around you that are familiar to you.
You know why we do this? It’s because the brain feels safe with familiarity and it feels threatened when things are new and different. It’s not about being brave or really good at trying new things. This is how the brain is built. And if you feel some uncertainty in any transition, particularly around something so important as our children moving into different stages, we want to be able to help our brains manage that. So we do it for ourselves.
What stays the same this fall? Your kid going into kindergarten or middle school or high school or college is still your kid. You still have him at dinner if he’s not away at college. If he is away at college, you still have phone calls with him. You still have that visit you’re going for parents’ weekend. You still have a lifelong relationship with him. You still have how much you love each other, and that doesn’t change when the schedules change. So write down the things that stay the same, and it will help us when we’re missing our children or the changes that we’re making.
And the fourth thing I want to share with you is probably the smallest, but it might be the most important. Let yourself have a little relief when you get time to yourself, when the kids go back to school, or when you find that your children are driving themselves and you don’t have to drive them anymore.
I know there’s a lot that you’ll miss. But there’s also time now that you didn’t have before. And let’s not put that on trial. When it shows up, you have that relief. You don’t have to examine it or justify it or apologize for it. It’s not related to how much you love your children.
Let yourself feel all your feelings. We can say, oh, I miss him, and I’m glad to have my morning free. And I think what will happen is that those feelings will come and they will rise and they will fall. And that’s how feelings work.
We are built for resilience. And that doesn’t mean feeling any right feeling at a right time. It means we can hold two feelings at once and keep going.
The Free Workshop and Closing
That’s how we take care of you during transitions, especially back to school.
Now, if what you’re actually worried about is your child and how they’re handling all of the transitions, I have something for you. I just created a workshop, Back to School With Confidence, that’s meant to help you help your children as they go through these transitions. It’s free for this month and the month of September. Check the show notes for today, episode 158, and find the link and access it. I think it will give you some great ideas for what to watch for with your kids, hopefully answer some questions for you if you’re seeing any little struggles with your kids, and hopefully just give you some support as you help your kids through this transition.
We’re so lucky to be moms to these amazing kids. And I hope that you feel supported and loved, that you do the most important job in the world.
Thank you for spending time with me today, and I will talk to you guys next week.
The Leadership Parenting Podcast is for general information purposes only. It is not therapy and should not take the place of meeting with a qualified mental health professional. The information on this podcast is not intended to diagnose or treat any condition, illness, or disease. It’s also not intended to be legal, medical, or therapeutic advice. Please consult your doctor or mental health professional for your individual circumstances. Thanks again and take care.