We Made It. Here We Go Again. (Why I Love Back to School Photos)

I love back to school photos.

The preschoolers carrying giant backpacks. The elementary school kids with missing teeth, and shiny sneakers. The middle and high school students who agreed to one picture...but would clearly like everyone to move this along.

And then there are the college dorm rooms...beds made, lights hung, storage containers somehow fitting under every available surface, and parents trying to remember whether they packed everything while also trying not to think too hard about the drive home.

For a few days, it feels like one of the rare times when we are all in it together.

There is excitement, and there are nerves...theirs and ours. But it feels less like a competition than a collective we made it. Another summer. Another year. Another first day. Another child somehow old enough to be standing where they are standing.

With the younger kids, there may be excitement about a new teacher or classroom mixed with worry about separation, friendships, or whether they will know where to go. Behind the camera, their parents are mentally running through lunch, pickup, forms, medications, transportation, after school plans, and the water bottle that is probably still sitting on the kitchen counter.

For some families, the beginning of school means the return of routines that make life feel more manageable. For others, it means schedules, practices, appointments, homework, and emails all starting again at once. Sometimes it is both. You can be completely ready for school to begin and still feel anxious about everything that comes with it.

Those aren’t contradictory experiences. They are what transitions often look like.

When we see the dorm rooms, roommates, school sweatshirts, and pictures taken right before parents leave, we say congratulations. We admire how everything came together. We ask how you’re holding up.

Sometimes you are mostly excited...and then one photo catches you off guard.

And somewhere underneath all of it is the same bewildered question...

How did they grow up so fast?

Intellectually, we know they didn’t grow up overnight. We were there. We thought we were paying attention. We bought the backpacks, attended the conferences, sat through the concerts, waited in pickup lines, worried about friendships, helped with applications, and argued about missing assignments.

And still...milestones have a way of making all those years feel suddenly compressed. One minute you are walking someone into kindergarten, and the next you are standing in a dorm room debating whether they really need another extension cord.

(Note to self: Go get the extra extension cord.)

There is pride in seeing your child move toward independence. There can also be sadness, anxiety, relief, excitement, and a sense of not quite knowing what your role is supposed to look like now.

We often describe this stage as an empty nest, but “empty” does not capture all of it. Your home may be quieter, but your mind may not be. You may still be tracking, or wanting to track, whether they are eating, sleeping, finding friends, keeping up with their work, and remembering that towels occasionally need to be washed.

You are still their parent. But the rhythms that used to tell you what was needed and when are changing. There are fewer daily instructions, less access to the ordinary details, and no obvious replacement for the routines that shaped family life for years.

You are both figuring out how this works now.

And nobody hands you a syllabus for that.

We tend to talk about back to school anxiety as something children experience, but the nerves in those photos do not all belong to them.

For parents, anxiety can look remarkably functional. It looks like organizing, reminding, researching, shopping, making lists, checking the list, and asking one more question because if everything is prepared, perhaps the transition will feel a little less uncertain.

Some of those things genuinely need to be done. Children forget forms. Dorm rooms need sheets. Someone has to know what time pickup is.

But it can help to notice when the tasks are doing two jobs at once...preparing your child and giving your own anxiety somewhere to go.

That may be part of why the photos feel so meaningful. They give us a shared way to recognize what is happening without requiring anyone to choose one emotion. We can celebrate the children and notice the adults standing just outside the frame. We can be ready for the routine, worried about what comes next, proud of who they are becoming, and caught off guard by how quickly we arrived here.

Something is changing for you too.

The days may suddenly be busier, or the house quieter than it has ever been. After years of organizing your life around schedules, rides, practices, school calendars, and who needs to be where, the absence of those familiar cues can be disorienting.

None of that means you are handling the transition badly. It means this moment matters to you.

So keep posting the photos. I want to see the giant backpacks, the missing teeth, the shiny sneakers, the reluctant teenagers, and the dorm rooms with far more pillows than anyone needs.

We made it.

Here we go again.