School is over. The exhale that takes a week to arrive.

Children's stress hormones follow the academic calendar with a fidelity that should surprise no one and yet consistently surprises the parents who mention it to me. The anticipatory cortisol rise before exams, before transitions, before anything that the nervous system has learned to associate with performance. The relief-drop at the end of term. The reorganisation that follows.

The difficult week — the one where children who have just been released from structure become temporarily impossible — is the nervous system doing exactly what it's supposed to do. It's running a reset. The problem is that the reset looks, from the outside, like regression or defiance or ingratitude. It's none of those things. It's recovery.

What the nervous system needs in the first week of school holidays is almost the opposite of what parents instinctively want to provide: more stimulation, more fun, a full programme. What it needs is: less. Fewer decisions. Slower mornings. The permission to be bored without the boredom being solved.

Boredom, specifically, is the beginning of the reset. The brain in genuine boredom enters what neuroscientists call the default mode network — the mental state associated with consolidation, creativity, and the processing of accumulated experience. Children who are constantly stimulated never enter this state. Children who are bored, and left to be bored, access a quality of rest that sleep alone doesn't provide.