The Real Reason It Feels Like They Forgot Everything

Every August, the panic creeps in. The summer packet is still blank. The reading goals faded weeks ago. And now, your child seems to have forgotten everything they knew before break.

 But here’s what you haven’t been told:

The problem isn’t your child’s memory.

It’s the conditions we create around how, when, and why they’re expected to retrieve information they may never have felt successful with in the first place.

This isn’t about blame—not for parents, and not for teachers. We love and deeply respect the work educators do. The truth is, many children fall through the cracks not because teachers aren’t doing their jobs, but because the system doesn’t allow enough room to scaffold each child's learning individually. We’re all doing our best in a structure that often asks too much, too fast.

Pressure Is the System. But It Doesn’t Have to Be Yours.

From the earliest grades, kids feel it: comparison, testing, and the constant race to keep up.

Parents feel it too. The fear that their child is falling behind. The worry they didn’t do enough over summer. The weight of academic success as a measure of future potential.

Jennifer Breheny Wallace’s Never Enough highlights this perfectly: children today aren’t just striving. They’re scrambling to prove they matter in a system that equates performance with worth. And parents are stuck between wanting to protect our kids from that pressure and very much not wanting them left behind.

But here’s the truth:

Real learning, learning that sticks doesn’t happen under pressure. It happens in safety.

And the first few weeks of school are often filled with rushed review, cold reads, and assessments that trigger a stress response before regulation has even settled in. New classroom. New teacher. New peers. It’s a lot, and that matters.

What Dysregulated Learning Looks Like

When a child is asked to retrieve information before they’re ready, here’s what we often see:

• Shutting down—freeze, fight, or flight

• Outbursts or sudden "laziness"

• Avoidance or perfectionism

• Masking (especially common in neurodivergent children)

These aren’t discipline issues. They’re nervous system responses. Your child’s body is protecting them from perceived threat: recall, in that moment, feels unsafe.

This is especially true for neurodivergent kids, children who mask all day, those with learning differences or emotional sensitivities, and kids with low self-esteem or a fear of failure. They don’t need more pressure. They need safety.

So What Does Help? Felt Success, Felt Ease, and Felt Safety

Let’s shift the goal. Instead of reviewing harder, we rebuild learning that feels safe enough to recall.

This means focusing on:

1. Felt Success: Your child needs multiple chances to get it right, without guessing, rushing, or shutting down. It’s not about praise. It’s about:

• Repetition that builds confidence

• Practicing during regulation, not distress

• Hearing: "Let’s do it together until it feels easy."

2. Felt Ease: When something feels easy, the brain says: this is safe, this is mine, I can store this.

This isn’t passive. It’s earned ease through co-regulation, patience, and attuned repetition. Ease is not the absence of challenge. It’s the presence of support — your support; because this type of support is not guaranteed in the classroom.

Ease reduces cognitive load and gives space for exploration, trial and error, and confidence-building without constant correction.

3. Felt Safety: Regulated brains learn. Dysregulated brains defend. A regulated nervous system stays in balance, which is what allows for rational thinking, problem solving, memory retrieval, and executive function. That’s why your regulation matters more than any workbook or flashcard. Because your calm helps them either become or remain calm when things are difficult. When you and your child are able to be calm, it becomes their roadmap for resilience when things get hard, knowing they can persevere.

That’s school readiness.

And it starts with your regulation, not more review.

What Parents Aren’t Told About Scaffolding

Scaffolding isn’t about doing the work for them. It’s about supporting them through the hard parts until they can do it on their own.

Developmental psychologist Lev Vygotsky called this the Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD): the sweet spot between what a child can do alone and what they can do with guidance.

But here’s what that actually looks like at home:

• Knowing if your child learns better through movement than sitting still

• Choosing to pause and come back later when they’re melting down and not powering through for the sake of getting "it" done

• Offering connection and co-regulation before correction or feedback

• Celebrating effort, creative problem-solving, and how they approach the task and not just the outcome

This is especially essential for:

• Neurodivergent kids

• Children with low self-esteem or fear of failure

• Kids who mask at school and melt at home

• Bilingual families where content review feels extra complex

• Parents who were the high achievers and now feel triggered by resistance

• Busy parents with limited time or confidence in teaching strategies

• Children perceived as "lazy" who are actually dysregulated, overstimulated, or anxious

Confidence Builds Mastery

A child has to feel confident in their ability to master something in order to actually master it.

That confidence doesn’t come from getting it right once. It comes from:

• Safe practice where they can learn, get it wrong, keep practicing, problem solve, try again and gain mastery

• Co-regulated support, even when it’s hard to see them struggle or resist, when we are short on time and parental bandwidth, when they are giving up. Finding your own regulation strategy before supporting them is key. Having practice with regulation strategy during low-stress moments helps the body find correlation between stress and a regulation strategy so that when a big trigger hits and the rational thinking brain is offline, the body already knows what to do, because it's had plenty of practice and similar mastery in calming the body down.

• Mistakes without shame. Shame doesn't teach or inspire. Children aren't wired to "teach us otherwise" until their late teens. Shame creates internal messaging and their inner voice.

• Freedom to try their own learning strategies

• Teaching it back to you in their own words. That is how you know and more importantly, your child knows the information.

Mastery follows safety. Repetition in safety is what creates memory.

What To Do Next

If this hit something for you:

• Save it. Reread it.

• Start small. Choose one routine like bedtime reading or math facts at breakfast and focus on ease, repetition, and co-regulation.

• Drop the pressure to perform. Your calm support is more powerful than any flashcard.

And if you’re still stuck, overwhelmed, or unsure how to help your child feel successful again—I see you. You’re not alone. Reach out. Book a 1:1 session and let’s build a plan that fits your child’s brain and your family’s real life.

References:

Breheny Wallace, J. (2022). Never enough: When achievement pressure backfires—and what to do about it. Penguin Press.

Vygotsky, L. S. (1978). Mind in society: The development of higher psychological processes. Harvard University Press.

Willoughby, M. T., Magnus, B. E., Vernon-Feagans, L., Blair, C. B., & Family Life Project Key Investigators. (2017). Developmental delays in executive function from 3 to 5 years of age predict kindergarten academic readiness. Developmental Psychology, 53(6), 1161–1172. https://doi.org/10.1037/dev0000317