Why Back-to-School Season Can Be So Overwhelming for Moms
Written by Holley Hillis, MSN, PMHNP-BC
The school supplies are purchased.
The backpacks are packed.
The first-day outfits are ready.
So why do you feel like you've spent the last three weeks coordinating a small military operation?
Back-to-school season is usually framed as an exciting time for kids. New teachers. New classrooms. New clothes. Fresh notebooks and freshly sharpened pencils.
For moms, it can look a little different.
It's completing registration forms while you're making dinner.
Remembering that one child needs a physical before sports start.
Realizing at 9 p.m. that tomorrow is the day you're supposed to send in the classroom supplies.
Figuring out transportation.
Checking lunch balances.
Moving bedtime earlier.
Finding shoes that somehow stopped fitting since June.
Adding practices, meetings, school events and appointments to the calendar.
Reading an email from the school that contains three dates you need to remember while simultaneously receiving another notification from the sports app.
And somewhere in the middle of all of this, you're still expected to do everything you were doing before school started.
If August and September leave you feeling unusually overwhelmed, there may be a reason.
Back-to-school season doesn't simply add more tasks.
For many mothers, it dramatically increases the mental load.
The Work You Can See and the Work You Can't
We tend to think about household responsibilities in terms of physical tasks.
Someone buys the school supplies.
Someone packs the lunches.
Someone drives to practice.
But there's another layer of work that's much harder to see.
Someone has to remember that those things need to happen in the first place.
That's the mental load.
It's remembering that picture day is Thursday.
Knowing the soccer uniform needs to be washed tonight.
Realizing there isn't enough lunch food to make it through Friday.
Keeping track of which child needs to bring a library book back tomorrow.
Noticing that the school nurse still needs a medication form.
Knowing that one child has an orthodontist appointment at 3:30 and the other needs to be picked up from practice at 4:00.
None of those individual things sounds particularly overwhelming.
The problem is that there may be dozens of them running through your brain simultaneously.
And research on household cognitive labor has found that mothers often carry a disproportionate share of this anticipating, planning, organizing and monitoring work within families.
That invisible responsibility can contribute to stress even when the physical chores themselves appear evenly divided.
Back-to-School Season Creates Hundreds of Tiny Decisions
Mental exhaustion doesn't always come from doing something objectively difficult.
Sometimes it comes from making decision after decision after decision.
What time does everyone need to wake up?
What can I pack for lunch?
Who's picking them up?
Did I sign that form?
Do we need another water bottle?
When can I schedule the physical?
Can she wear those shoes for gym?
Did he finish his homework?
What are we having for dinner after practice?
Do we have clean uniforms?
Where is the permission slip?
Each question is tiny.
Together, they create a tremendous amount of cognitive clutter.
That's one reason you may finally sit down at the end of the day and feel completely exhausted even though you can't identify one particularly difficult thing you did.
Your brain has been managing logistics all day.
Why Transitions Can Feel So Difficult
Even positive transitions require adjustment.
During summer, your family develops one rhythm.
Then school starts and suddenly almost everything changes at once.
Wake-up times change.
Bedtimes change.
Transportation changes.
Meal schedules change.
Extracurricular activities return.
Homework begins.
Your children's emotional needs may change as they adjust to new teachers, classmates and expectations.
And your own schedule has to reorganize around all of it.
Human brains generally benefit from predictability. When routines change, we temporarily have to devote more conscious attention to things that eventually become automatic.
In October, packing lunches may barely require thought.
During the first week of school, you're still figuring out who will actually eat what, which lunchbox belongs to whom, where the ice packs disappeared to, and what time everyone needs to leave the house.
That transition requires mental energy.
ADHD Can Make Back-to-School Season Especially Challenging
For a mother with ADHD, back-to-school season can feel like someone suddenly multiplied the number of tabs open in her brain.
ADHD can affect executive functions involved in:
planning
organization
working memory
task initiation
prioritization
time management
shifting attention
Now add school calendars, emails, appointments, extracurricular schedules, homework, paperwork and morning routines.
A woman may have developed systems that work reasonably well during normal life, only to find that those systems suddenly aren't enough when the family's cognitive demands increase.
This doesn't mean she's incapable of managing her family.
It means the environment is asking considerably more from the exact cognitive systems ADHD can make more difficult to manage.
And sometimes motherhood is when previously overlooked ADHD becomes much harder to compensate for.
Before children, you were primarily managing yourself.
Now you're managing yourself plus several other people's schedules, belongings, deadlines and needs.
That difference can be enormous.
Anxiety Can Turn Planning Into Constant Anticipation
Some planning is necessary.
Anxiety can turn planning into trying to prevent every possible problem before it happens.
What if we oversleep?
What if she doesn't make friends?
What if he forgets his homework?
What if I'm late for pickup?
What if they struggle academically this year?
What if something goes wrong and I don't notice?
Suddenly your brain isn't only managing today's responsibilities.
It's trying to manage hypothetical future ones too.
That can make it incredibly difficult to mentally clock out.
You may finally get everyone into bed and discover that your body is exhausted while your mind has already moved on to tomorrow.
Then There's the Emotional Side of Back-to-School
The logistical burden isn't the only thing happening.
Back-to-school season can bring complicated emotions for parents too.
Maybe your kindergartner suddenly looks impossibly small walking into school.
Maybe your teenager barely looked back.
Maybe another school year makes you acutely aware of how quickly your children are growing.
Maybe you're relieved to have some structure again and then feel guilty for being relieved.
Maybe you're worried about your child's friendships, academic performance, bullying, mental health or ability to adjust.
Maybe your child is anxious about school, which means you're helping regulate their emotions while managing your own.
You can be excited for your child and sad.
Relieved and overwhelmed.
Ready for school to start and somehow not ready at all.
Those things can coexist.
Why Am I So Irritable?
Sometimes overwhelm doesn't look like lying on the couch saying, “I'm overwhelmed.”
It looks like snapping because someone can't find their shoes.
Getting disproportionately angry when another email comes from school.
Feeling touched out.
Becoming irritated when someone asks you a completely reasonable question.
Wanting everyone to stop talking to you for five minutes.
And then feeling guilty because you were irritable.
Irritability can be one of the signs that your mental bandwidth is running low.
It doesn't necessarily mean something is clinically wrong.
Sometimes it means you're carrying too much information, responsibility and stimulation at once.
Instead of immediately asking, “Why am I being so irritable?”
it may be worth asking:
“How much am I trying to hold right now?”
The Mental Load Doesn't Have to Belong to One Person
One of the most useful things families can do during high-demand seasons is distinguish between helping with a task and owning a responsibility.
Those aren't the same thing.
Imagine one parent says:
“Just tell me what you need me to do.”
That may be well intentioned.
But the other parent is still responsible for figuring out what needs to be done, deciding when it needs to happen, remembering it and delegating it.
They're still the project manager.
Sharing the mental load can look more like:
“You're responsible for soccer this season.”
That includes knowing the practice schedule, monitoring messages, remembering equipment, arranging transportation and keeping track of changes.
The responsibility has actually transferred.
When possible, distributing ownership rather than individual chores can remove some of the invisible cognitive work from one person's plate.
Your Kids Can Carry Some of the Load Too
Age appropriately, of course.
But children don't have to be passive participants in the family logistics system.
A child may be able to:
pack their backpack,
fill their water bottle,
put their sports equipment by the door,
check their homework folder,
choose clothes the night before,
or help pack their lunch.
Will they do all of those things perfectly?
Absolutely not.
But the goal isn't perfection.
Part of growing up is gradually learning to manage your own responsibilities.
And Mom doesn't need to remain the family's external hard drive forever.
Lower the Bar Where It Doesn't Matter
Not every season of life needs maximum-effort parenting.
Back-to-school week may not also need elaborate dinners.
The perfectly organized pantry can wait.
Your child will survive if their first-day-of-school sign wasn't custom-made.
And no one needs twelve individually labeled bins to prove they're prepared for third grade.
When your cognitive load increases in one area, deliberately simplifying another area can help.
Ask yourself:
What actually needs to happen this week?
Then:
What would simply be nice if it happened?
Those are different lists.
When Is Back-to-School Stress More Than Normal Stress?
Feeling overwhelmed during a busy transition doesn't automatically mean you have a mental health condition.
Stress is a normal response to increased demands.
But it's worth paying attention when symptoms become persistent, severe or begin interfering with your ability to function.
Consider talking with a healthcare professional if you're experiencing things like:
anxiety that feels difficult to control
persistent sadness or loss of interest
significant sleep problems
frequent panic symptoms
irritability that's affecting your relationships
difficulty functioning at work or home
concentration or executive-function problems that seem significantly greater than expected
feeling unable to manage responsibilities you previously handled
symptoms that continue even after the initial back-to-school transition settles
Sometimes a demanding season simply exposes how close to capacity you already were.
The school year didn't necessarily create the anxiety, depression, ADHD or burnout.
It may have made it harder to compensate for it.
You Were Never Supposed to Hold Everything in Your Head
There is an enormous difference between loving your family and being mentally responsible for every detail of everyone's life.
If you're overwhelmed right now, it may not be because you're disorganized.
It may not be because you need a better planner.
And it certainly doesn't mean you're failing at motherhood.
You may simply be carrying an extraordinary number of small responsibilities that nobody else can see.
So this back-to-school season, instead of asking:
“How can I get better at keeping up with everything?”
consider asking:
“Does everything I'm keeping up with actually need to belong to me?”
That may be a much more useful place to start.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why does back-to-school season make me so anxious?
School starting can introduce many simultaneous changes in schedules, responsibilities, routines and decision-making. If you're also anticipating potential problems or worrying about how your child will adjust, the cognitive and emotional demands can increase even further.
Why does back-to-school feel harder with ADHD?
Back-to-school season places significant demands on executive functions such as organization, working memory, time management, planning and task initiation. Those are also areas that can be difficult for people with ADHD, so the sudden increase in logistical demands may make symptoms more noticeable.
Is it normal to feel relieved when my kids go back to school?
Yes. Relief doesn't mean you don't enjoy your children or didn't value your summer together. Structure, routine, quiet time or having predictable hours again may genuinely make daily life easier.
How can my partner help with the mental load?
Rather than simply completing individual tasks when asked, it can help for partners to take ownership of entire areas of responsibility. That includes anticipating, planning, remembering and completing what needs to happen.
When should I seek help for feeling overwhelmed?
Consider professional support when anxiety, depression, irritability, sleep difficulties, concentration problems or other symptoms persist, cause significant distress, or interfere with your work, relationships or everyday functioning.
Disclaimer
This article is for educational purposes only and is not intended to diagnose or treat a mental health or medical condition. Everyone experiences stress differently. If you're concerned about changes in your mood, anxiety, attention, sleep or ability to function, consider speaking with a qualified healthcare professional.