The last morning of this school year. The child at the door.

There's a particular quality of attention that children give to endings without knowing they're doing it. They linger. They slow. They touch things. My colleague Victor — whose clinic sees children through every kind of transition — calls this 'threshold behaviour': the unconscious slowing at a boundary.

The last morning of a school year is full of these micro-pauses. The child who takes slightly longer over breakfast. The one who puts on their shoes and then takes them off again and puts them on again. The one who goes back upstairs for something they don't actually need.

Adults read this as stalling. It isn't. It's the nervous system registering: something is ending here. Let me look at it one more time.

I taught secondary school for three years before I moved into research, and I remember the last day from the teacher's side: the particular quality of the classroom in the last hour, when everyone knows it's almost over. The children become simultaneously more present and more wistful. They say things to each other they haven't said all year. They are, briefly, entirely themselves — because the performance of being the person you are in this class is about to end, and they know it.

What strikes me now, watching my daughter, is how early this starts. She's nine. She stopped at the door without knowing why.