Let’s face it: nobody playing Division III football this fall is going to be recruited by the Washington Commanders next season. This is part of its charm. D-III teams are largely filled with young people who still want to play just to play. They want to compete, get better, and be part of a team for four more years, but they also understand that at the end of college, they are not bound for Las Vegas to be drafted. They are going to have to find a job.

I played Division III field hockey. I wasn’t a star player, but I had been at it for years. In high school, a ball I hit may or may not have caught a divot, launched itself into the air traveling roughly a million miles an hour, and hit one Vice President’s daughter squarely in the mouth. Capitol Hill has nothing on the combativeness of a girls’ school rivalry.

By college, I knew that I was a reasonably good sweep who could nail the ball from one end of the field to the other. I also knew that I was never going to be much use on the offensive line. Every once in a while my coach would throw me up front, perhaps hoping some previously undiscovered offensive talent might reveal itself. Chapman Kern, I have to hand it to you, you tried. I am fairly certain that on one of those occasions I actually ran the wrong way with the ball, so disoriented was I by being removed from my tried-and-true position protecting the goalie. I knew my role. I could stop a ball, clear it halfway to the next county, and make life reasonably unpleasant for anyone trying to get near our goal. I was useful.

Perhaps this is what I find so appealing about Division III sports. They give young people the increasingly unusual experience of being good at something without needing to be the best at it. You can love something without needing to turn it into a career. You can compete fiercely and care enormously while understanding that none of it is actually life or death.

What it does produce, almost incidentally, are lifetime skills. You acquire teammates who notice when you don’t show up and, if you are lucky, a coach who knows you well enough to tell you the truth.

Coach Eric Taylor from Friday Night Lights may be one of the great fictional practitioners of raising other people’s children. He was married to Tami Taylor, a school counselor who possessed considerably more sophisticated language for discussing feelings than he did. Tami could help a teenager understand why he was making terrible choices. Eric would tell him, with brutal specificity and often at considerable volume, that he was making terrible choices and had better knock it off.

He could also be a terrific asshole. But the kids knew he cared about them. He paid attention. He knew what they were capable of, and that gave him permission to tell them the truth. We could use more adults like that. Not assholes. Trust me, we have plenty of those. I mean adults who have earned enough trust with a young person to tell them something they do not want to hear.

The peculiar genius of a good coach is that the judgment is never the end of the story. You played badly. You let your teammates down. You stayed out until three in the morning and arrived smelling like a bourbon bottle. Run it off. Practice is tomorrow. Underneath it all is a remarkably hopeful message: I know you can do better because I know you, and you are an important part of this team.

All of this feels increasingly important in an age obsessed with optimization.

Optimization works beautifully when the destination is known. Google Maps knows you want to get to Atlanta, so it adjusts the variables until it finds the most efficient route. Brilliant. But childhood doesn’t come with a destination address. Let me actually underscore that point: childhood SHOULD NOT come with a destination address. (Yes, I’m using “should” but I mean this… very seriously).

Here’s what we do... A child likes soccer, so we find the better team, then the travel team, then the private coach, until there is an alarming family investment in the athletic prospects of someone who still occasionally forgets her shin guards. We have taken something that might simply have been good for a child and begun asking where it can take her.

The trouble is that human beings do not develop particularly efficiently. We develop through detours, boredom, disappointment, surprise, and things we love for a while and then abandon. From an optimization standpoint, this is inefficiency. From a human standpoint, it is the WHOLE project.

This may be one reason sports matter even more now. Technology can increasingly intervene in almost every part of a young person’s life. Artificial intelligence can help write the essay, solve the equation, or compose the awkward text to a crush. Put a twelve-year-old on a soccer field, however, and she is still largely on her own. She has to respond to what is happening around her, in real time, with other human beings. Naturally, adults have responded by trying to optimize the hell out of that too.

If the desired outcome of childhood is admission to a particular college, we can optimize for that, but dear God, that is not a good idea at the age of eight. If the desired outcome is a young person who can work hard, be a friend, survive disappointment, contribute to a community, and eventually construct a life that is actually her own, we are on much less certain and yet hugely fertile ground.

By college, I knew field hockey wasn’t going to take me anywhere. That wasn’t a failure of the experience. It was a gift. I got to play something I loved. I had teammates, coaches, and a place I was expected to be. I learned that I could be useful without being the best player on the field and that sometimes the most important thing I could do was stand between someone else and the goal.

Eventually, I stopped playing. There was no scholarship or measurable return on all those afternoons spent running around a field with a stick in my hand, battling mosquitos. There were just some very good friends, a collection of lifetime skills, and, somewhere, perhaps a Vice President’s wife who is still cranky about my stick skills.

That seems like a pretty good return on the investment.

Somewhat inexplicably, the image of Dolly and her nails makes me think about Mrs. Bellino. When I was a little girl, the neighborhood children carpooled to school, and I dreaded going. I was dyslexic, although I didn’t have particularly useful language for that at the time, and school was not an especially kind culture for a child whose brain worked the way mine did. But I loved the mornings when Mrs. Bellino drove. I found her fascinating and absolutely fabulous. She was always pulled together, even when she was still wearing her bathrobe, because it was a fancy bathrobe. She had the most magnificent fingernails, long and perfectly shaped and always painted some fierce color. She would somehow balance a cup of coffee on top of the steering wheel, and drive the station wagon like a Formula One racer. I would sit in the back seat watching the whole operation in wonder.

It calmed me down perhaps because there was just no room left in my nervous system to worry about school while I was contemplating whether Mrs. Bellino was going to make the left turn, save the coffee, and preserve the manicure simultaneously. But I think there was something else happening too. She was enjoying herself. The morning had a certain rhythm to it. She was not acting as though getting us to school was a military maneuver upon which the future of Western civilization depended.

All of this brings me to perhaps the most painfully obvious piece of back-to-school advice I have: pay attention to the way you get them there. I don’t just mean whether you get them there on time, or whether they remembered the math homework or the lacrosse stick or the signed permission slip. Pay attention to the emotional condition in which you deliver them, because children do not magically reset when they walk through the schoolhouse door. They bring the morning with them.

This is one of those things educators have always known intuitively and researchers have now spent considerable time demonstrating. In one study, researchers followed 384 children through the transition into kindergarten and repeatedly measured their morning cortisol, one of the hormones involved in the body’s stress response. Most of the children’s cortisol rose during the first two weeks of school. There is also a substantial body of research around stress and executive function, which is the rather clinical term for many of the things we need children to do all day long: pay attention, remember instructions, control an impulse, shift from one task to another, and begin something difficult even when they would rather not.

I find all of this fascinating, although given my own feelings about elementary school, I am fairly certain I had exhausted my lifetime supply of cortisol by the third grade.

None of this means that if you yell at your child about a missing shoe at 7:32 in the morning you have doomed her performance on the algebra test. But stress consumes some of the mental and emotional bandwidth we are asking children to use when they arrive at school, and the same is true for us. If you spend forty-five minutes screaming, hunting for a missing permission slip, threatening consequences, and trying to get three children into the car, you don’t magically reset after drop-off either. You bring the morning to the office with you.

The goal, then, is not to create a perfectly serene morning. No one needs another standard against which parents can discover they are failing. The more useful goal is predictability, and much of that can be created the night before. Find the shoes. Charge the computer. Get the homework into the backpack rather than leaving it beautifully completed on the kitchen counter. Put whatever athletic equipment is required by the door. Make sure the phone is charging somewhere other than six inches from your child’s head. This is also the single greatest argument I know for school uniforms. I realize there are lofty theories about uniforms creating community, diminishing socioeconomic differences, and instilling school pride, but none beats the fact that at 7:06 in the morning they eliminate a decision.

Children can increasingly own all of this themselves. A five-year-old can learn that shoes go by the door; a nine-year-old can pack a backpack; a fourteen-year-old is entirely capable of determining whether the computer has enough electricity in it to survive English class. The trick, I think, is to make preparedness feel less like another series of parental commands and more like a family game in which everybody is competing against the real enemy: the morning.

Here is my little work in progress chart. Use it, change it, let your children rename everything on it. The point is not the points. The point is to move as much of tomorrow morning’s chaos as possible into tonight, when nobody is standing at the door screaming that the bus is coming.

Organization, though, is only half of this. The other half has to do with how we enter things. The priest in me would call this a spiritual practice, the educator in me would call it a practical one, and the reluctant mystic might even call it a little bit of magic. Whatever language you prefer, human beings have understood for a very long time that transitions matter and that rituals, meaningful and sometimes ridiculous, help us make them.

So what’s your ritual? Play the same song as you get close to school. Say a prayer. Take a breath. Say the same ridiculous sentence every morning for twelve years. The ritual matters much less than the transition it introduces, a small signal that whatever happened at home does not necessarily have to follow you through the schoolhouse door.

And what’s your rating? Because families also need a language for the mornings when none of this works, and some mornings will simply be a dumpster fire. I rather like “dumpster fire” as family code for: That went very badly. I know it went badly. I know I contributed to its going badly, and we do not need to conduct an investigation into it in the school parking lot. The game board has a few possibilities, from “Nailed it” to “Hot mess” to the full “Dumpster fire.” Better yet, let your children invent their own.

I would establish only two rules.

• First, you rate the morning, not the people in it. The morning was a dumpster fire. Your mother is not a dumpster fire.

• Second, once somebody calls it, the conversation is over. No closing arguments in the drop-off line and no “and another thing” as the child opens the car door. If you were part of the problem, you get to say that too: “Dumpster fire. Mostly mine. I’m sorry. I love you. Go have a better day.”

There is a fairly profound lesson tucked inside that ridiculous little exchange. We don’t need to teach children that competent adults never lose their tempers, forget things, run late, or occasionally make a complete hash of the morning. They will discover the truth about us soon enough. We can teach them something much more useful: how to recognize when things have gone wrong, own our part in them, repair what we can, and begin again. None of that means children escape responsibility for their own behavior. It simply means that the school parking lot is probably not the place to sort it all out. A bad fifteen minutes does not have to become a bad day.

Last night I was talking to one of my closest friends about her son, my tenth-grade godchild, who had assured her all week that he was packed and ready to leave for football camp and boarding school. Five minutes before departure, it emerged that every ounce of clean laundry he owned was still on the floor of his room, he had no idea where the new football gear his mother had thoughtfully ordered weeks earlier had gone, and he was, by this point, being a snarly jerk about the whole thing. She lost it with him. It was epic. And now, of course, she is beating herself to a pulp over having lost her temper.

I told her to stop and remember that sometimes kids are just jerks and parents lose it and all the rituals, charts, cortisol studies, breathing exercises, and beautifully packed backpacks in the world are not going to save you. The goal isn’t to prevent every meltdown. It is to develop some patterns for what happens afterward: a little forgiveness, an apology when one is owed, perhaps a sense of humor, and the knowledge that loving one another does not require us to have handled every moment beautifully.

Back to Mrs. Bellino… I have no memory of what she said to us on those drives to school. I doubt there was a mindfulness exercise, and there was certainly no laminated checklist. I remember the station wagon, the coffee, those magnificent fingernails, and the fact that I felt better. A child who really did not want to go to school climbed into her car, and somehow the world felt a little less threatening. Maybe it was simply that Mrs. Bellino did not seem terribly worried about anything. Maybe children borrow that from adults too.

We spend enormous amounts of time worrying about what our children will encounter once they walk through the doors of school: whether the teacher will understand them, whether they will make friends, whether they will struggle, whether somebody will be unkind, whether they will find their way. Most of that is beyond our control. But every morning, for a surprisingly small number of years, we get to help them approach the threshold. We can make the night before a little more organized and the morning a little more predictable. We can turn down our own anxiety and apologize when we don’t. We can make them laugh. We can remind them that whatever happened at the breakfast table does not have to follow them into first-period math. And then we have to let them get out of the car, preferably with their backpack.

If not, there is always tomorrow.

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Preface to the series

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A little fairy tale to begin.

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HERE is a google worksheet for planning

HERE is a link to readings

HERE is a link to music

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Dealin…

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