What Makes Kids Excited to Go Back to School? (It's Not the Backpack)

Walk down the school supply aisle in August and you'll see carts filling up with notebooks, crayons, lunchboxes, backpacks, and an unreasonable number of glue sticks.

The National Retail Federation puts annual U.S. back-to-school spending well north of $39 billion — one of the biggest retail seasons outside the holidays.

Which raises a reasonable question: does any of it make a kid excited to go?

$39 billion in the supply aisle

For some kids, yes — a new backpack genuinely does something. Fresh start energy is real and shouldn't be dismissed.

But ask children directly what they're looking forward to and the list barely overlaps with the receipt. It's friends, a new teacher, being older, learning something, and belonging to a classroom.

The CDC finds students who feel connected to their school have better emotional well-being and stronger academic outcomes. Connection, not equipment, is the active ingredient.

Seeing friends again

Ask an elementary student what they're excited about. Very few lead with math.

They say a name.

Summer is great, and it's also long and structureless. Kids miss the daily texture of school — lunch together, recess, the running joke in their class, working on something with somebody.

Those relationships are how children feel they belong somewhere, and belonging keeps showing up as one of the better predictors of how a school year goes.

Meeting a new teacher

Every school year opens with genuine uncertainty, which for kids is roughly half dread and half possibility.

New classroom. New teacher. New everything.

Adults remember their favorite teacher for decades. Almost never because of a worksheet — because of how that person made them feel about their own capability. Kids know this is a lottery, and they're paying attention to the result.

Feeling older

This one gets underrated by adults constantly.

"I'm in second grade now." "I'm one of the big kids." "I'm finally in middle school."

A new grade is a visible promotion, and kids feel it as one. Each year is another chapter where they got more capable, and they want that acknowledged.

Traditions do the heavy lifting

Think about what actually gets remembered: Spirit Week, Field Day, the book fair, reading month, assemblies, class parties, Back-to-School Night, kindergarten graduation.

Those become the stories families still tell years later. School isn't only where children learn — it's where a lot of childhood physically happens. (More in Back-to-School Traditions Kids Remember Forever and Why School Spirit Matters.)

When the first day is scary

For plenty of kids the first day isn't exciting at all. That's normal and not a problem to be fixed urgently.

What helps:

• Talking about school positively without overselling it
• Visiting the campus before day one if you can
• Practicing the morning routine so it isn't new on top of everything else
• Reading books about starting school
• Treating the milestone as worth celebrating
• Having one small first-day tradition that repeats every year

There's a fuller version of this in How to Help Kids Feel Confident Starting School.

Make the day itself the gift

The pattern in all of this: what kids get excited about is being recognized. Recognized as older, as capable, as someone whose new chapter is a big deal.

That can be a pancake breakfast. It can be the same doorstep photo every August. It can be a note in the lunchbox.

It can also be an adventure waiting after school where they're the hero — that's what our Back-to-School collection is for (code SCHOOL30 is running this season). Upload one photo, tell us about your kid, and they star in their own game.

Whatever form it takes, the goal is the same: make the first day feel like something they got to have, not something that happened to them. Start their adventure.