Sometimes, as a parent, you just make an oversight. Sometimes you’re so focused on the big-picture stuff that you completely forget something small, but crucial and completely obvious… in retrospect, anyway.

That’s the position Diana Park found herself in, when her son came home from the first week of kindergarten in a borrowed pair of pants because he’d had an accident. “My son had been potty trained for years and never had so much as an accident overnight, so I started searching my brain, wondering how that happened,” she writes. “Maybe he was so engrossed in the story sharing during circle time, he didn’t want to get up to go and miss anything. Maybe he was too shy to raise his hand and ask if he could go to the bathroom.”

It was something much, much simpler. Read it, and I bet you’ve got a similar story about something.

Kelly Faircloth, Executive Editor

Speaking of getting ready for school, I love this crucial tip from Dr. Chelsey Hauge-Zavaleta (@drchelsey_parentinga on TikTok), a parenting coach and mom. It’s another one of those things that seems so obvious once you think about it, but it’s easy to get caught up in the back-to-school rush and lose sight of it: “If this is your child’s first or second week of school, you need to go easy, easy, easy, easy,” she begins in a recent video. Read the article for more.