As summer winds down, parents, children, and teens across the land will begin navigating the transition back to school.

Rob Park, PsyD, a child and adolescent psychologist at Kaiser Permanente in Antioch for 21 years, walks us through how to make the transition from summertime to a more structured life around school.

Navigating bedtimes and sleep routines

During summer, there’s a lot of free time, and sometimes I see kids and teens going to bed well after midnight, even up to 3 a.m. And then they sleep into the afternoon. This can be a difficult adjustment when school starts.

If you help them go to bed earlier gradually, they won’t notice the transition as much. You don’t want to go from a summer sleep schedule to a school schedule overnight. That would be really hard.

I recommend a cooperative approach between parent and child starting about one week before the first day of school to make a smooth transition. You want to set that bedtime a little earlier and earlier each day.

Coping with back-to-school anxiety

For a lot of students, the first day of school comes with a mixture of nervousness and excitement.

Children might be thinking about where they will sit, what the teacher is like, who their friends will be. It’s a good idea for parents to normalize that anxiety and not dismiss or devalue it by saying, “Don’t worry about it.” That turns kids off.

We might start by saying it’s OK to be nervous, then shift to the positive. Help them recall that they got through the first day of school jitters the previous year. Support their transition by helping them say they can do it. Any time you can point to something that was difficult for them in the past and they succeeded, that’s a great formula. Those kinds of positive messages are really good for kids.

For kids who have experienced trauma at school or racism, or for those who just have a hard time at school, let administrators know they have past challenges. If a child has a learning disorder, teachers and counselors should be reminded.

Monitoring screen time

Screen management at any time of the year is super hard and especially when going back to school. For kids who have phones, one of the best things to use is the “do-not-disturb” feature. That should go on at night, so they are not responding to texts or notifications in the middle of the night.

Obviously, device screens are easier to manage if your kid is 5 or 6, but if the kid is 12, you’re going to have to monitor them more closely. It’s a good idea to know what apps they have on their devices and know who they are talking, too. If you are worried, check text messages.

It should be a collaborative process. But at the same time, children and teens should know from the get-go that it’s not a constitutional right to have any of these devices whether they are tablets, laptops, watches, phones, or any other kind of screen. It’s within your rights as parents to take it away if screen time is abused.

For older teens, they should know being on the phone should not get in the way of school priorities. They should be going to school, participating, and doing their assignments. If they are not turning in their work or going to class because of the phone use, then you’re going to have some serious conversations about that.

Positive, validating reinforcement

There’s a range in all kids on how the back-to-school transition goes for them. But generally, if parents use understanding and validating language to acknowledge going back to school is hard and learning is hard, that can go a long way.

And again, always take the opportunity to remind them that they have been successful at doing something hard in the past —  and they can do it again.