Pre-school anxiety. What the nervousness is actually about.

My daughter told me the week before school started last year that she had a 'feeling in her stomach' that she couldn't describe. She was eight. I said: what kind of feeling? She said: a bit like when you're about to do something and you don't know if it's going to be okay.

That description is one of the most accurate accounts of anticipatory anxiety I've heard from a child. She had identified the structure of the feeling without having the clinical vocabulary: it is the experience of an uncertain outcome approached with stakes attached.

Pre-school nervousness is often categorised by parents as either a problem (my child is anxious about school) or evidence of a problem (something went wrong last year that they're still carrying). In most cases it is neither. It is the appropriate emotional response to a transition into an environment with stakes — social, academic, logistical — whose specific conditions are not yet known.

The child who is nervous before school starts is doing something cognitively sophisticated: they are modelling a future situation with insufficient information and experiencing the emotional register of that uncertainty. That is not pathology. That is exactly the kind of future-modelling that adaptive human cognition is supposed to do.