December gets all the credit for being the month that breaks you with the concerts, the shopping, the coordinating, the emotional labor of making magic while also keeping everything from falling apart.
But June? June is December’s unhinged mother-in-law who shows up without warning, moves into your guest room, and starts criticizing your parenting.
I call it Junecember. And if you live in Westchester County and have kids, it’s arguably the most hectic month of the year, and it becomes even harder when your kid has ADHD.
Here’s what June actually looks like for most of us: half days that start the second week of the month and somehow still require a full morning routine. Camp forms that were due two weeks ago and somehow still haven’t been submitted. Teacher appreciation gifts to source, wrap, and personalize. Wardrobes to swap out, because the shorts from last summer definitely don’t fit and you didn’t notice until this morning.
All of this, layered on top of the regular to-do list that never actually gets shorter, just reshuffled.
And then when your kid has ADHD, there’s the IEP meeting someone scheduled for the second-to-last week of school.
What I’ve noticed in my own house and in the work I do with moms is that June has a particular texture when your kid needs more structure than the average kid. The end of the school year brings a kind of dysregulation that is almost seasonal by now.
Routines that took until March to actually stick are starting to unravel. The school schedule gets chopped up and shuffled around, and kids who depend on predictability to function suddenly find themselves operating on a calendar that looks like it was put together by someone spinning a wheel.
The behavioral fallout comes home with them—every afternoon. Meanwhile, you are trying to mentally hold the transition from school year to summer — different camps, different drop-off times, different everything — while also wrapping up your own Q2, fielding texts from your babysitter about scheduling, and figuring out whether your kid even has enough sunscreen to last the season.
For some moms, this isn’t just a busy season. It’s a genuine pressure point. The emotions get louder. The resistance to transitions gets bigger. And you, already stretched thin, are the person who has to hold it together when he loses it over the wrong color water bottle at 7:45 in the morning.
Here’s what I tell the moms I work with, and what I have to remind myself every June: the chaos isn’t evidence that you’re doing it wrong. It’s evidence that you’re doing an enormous amount during a month that is objectively a lot. What has worked for me during Junecember is to delegate or give up—or both.
Maybe your family eats off paper plates a little more this month. Maybe you have your babysitter work an extra hour and send her to pick up the teacher gifts while you finish your 4 o’clock meeting. Maybe you get every teacher a Starbucks gift card and skip the personalized, Pinterest-worthy token of appreciation entirely, because let’s be real, that’s what they actually want. They’ve been thanked in candles and tumblers for years. They just want coffee.
