January. The specific tiredness of coming back.

My daughter got back into bed at 7:15am on the Monday after Christmas break and told me her legs didn't work. She was ten. I said her legs worked fine. She said they didn't feel fine. I said that's different.

The first Monday back after Christmas is consistently the hardest transition of the school year, harder even than the first day of September. In September, the novelty carries children through the resistance. In January, there is no novelty — there is only the gap between the ease of the holiday and the demand of the schedule.

Children who found school hard in the autumn will find it hard again in January. Children who found it easy in the autumn will find it harder in January than in September. This is not regression. This is the cost of contrast: the larger the gap between what the holiday felt like and what school demands, the greater the effort required to bridge it. The effort is real. It costs something. The tiredness is the cost. My daughter's legs were fine. The difficulty was real. Both were true. By Friday she was telling me about something funny that happened at lunch. That is the trajectory. You just have to give it enough days.