The joy of watching my kids grow into the next stage of life is balanced out by the feeling that most of August is the Sunday before school starts.

Raising kids is hard, and it’s okay to feel a little relief when structure returns. But I think we should be thoughtful about the message our children receive in the way we celebrate.

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Scrolling through social media this time of year brings meme after meme of parents, usually moms, who are thrilled the school year is starting because it’s time to ship their kids off to someone else five days a week. The photos of moms in robes on their doorstep holding a glass of wine are everywhere.

Kids notice when we seem overly eager to send them away. They remember whether we treated their presence as a burden or a gift. They hear how their parents are elated about sending them elsewhere for hours every day. Kids are much more perceptive than we give them credit for. Even if all of the back-to-school jubilation is in jest, deep down they know they are of some undue burden to their parents.

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Conflicting emotions are common and parents shouldn’t beat themselves up over them. A study of 2,000 parents over the summer revealed 57% were happy about their kids returning to school but also felt guilty about it. Yet a different study showed 67% of parents who thought summer break was too long.

I get that parents need a break, especially from the endless snack requests and demands of kids over the summer. No parent should be shamed for taking care of themselves in order to be a better parent for their kids. Yet that’s not what back-to-school season has become. It’s become a time when parents can thrillingly announce to the world that they are so happy to dump their kids at school and make them someone else’s problem.

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In a culture that has so devalued the family and children, this isn’t a surprise but it is disheartening. I used to think these kinds of posts were funny until I really thought about it. We only have so much time with our kids until they move out, go to school, and have lives of their own. I’m proud to watch my kids begin a new school year. I’m excited for what they’ll learn and who they’ll become. But I’m also sad to see summer end because I love having them home. I love the memories, the slow mornings, the time together, and the little moments that pass far too quickly.

Parenting is hard and no one could ever be prepared for it, no matter how many books they read or other parents they talk to. We have so much responsibility on our plates that it can easily be overwhelming. Humans will make decisions based on their priorities — that’s what it all comes down to. Faith, marriage, kids, work, and hobbies all vie for the top spot and we have to make hard decisions every day but if those priorities are in order, it will be much easier to choose the right thing.

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I’m not suggesting every parent homeschool or drop everything to spend 24 hours a day catering to their kids. I’m saying that our children are incredible gifts and we should not be so anxious to shove them out the door and on the school bus for eight hours a day for nine or ten months of the year. Get involved in your kid’s school. Coach their rec team. Invite their friends for a movie night or ice cream or pizza making party at your house. Go on a hike with your kids and their friends. Be present. Put your phone down. Ask questions. Say ‘yes’ more.

We only have one life. Our kids are only young once and they see everything. I make plenty of mistakes as a mom but valuing the time I have with them is one mistake I try the hardest to avoid.

So yes, celebrate back-to-school season. Just make sure your kids know they are loved, wanted, and deeply missed when they’re away.

Last year, I asked The Atlantic’s writers and editors to name a perfect episode of TV, but a perfect finale is especially hard to pull off—and nothing invokes the wrath of fans quite like a bad ending. Here are eight shows that make the most out of their last minutes.

The following contains spoilers for the shows mentioned.

Fleabag (streaming on Prime Video)

Almost nobody is left happy by the final moments of Fleabag—not the heartbroken but resolute “Hot Priest”; not the protagonist Fleabag, watching a fox trail behind the man who has just left her for God; and certainly not the viewer, who has no choice but to let Fleabag look into the camera, shake her head, and leave us behind.

But the best ending is a cathartic one. Fleabag, played by the show’s creator, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, is a dry-humored, unabashed, fourth-wall-breaking character who encounters God and new meaning in the second season, which is also the last. She attends a Quaker meeting and is moved by the Holy Spirit to say one of my favorite lines of the series: “I sometimes worry I wouldn’t be such a feminist if I had bigger tits.” She and her sister, Claire, repair their relationship and each kneel, exasperated, before different men to ask for deliverance—Claire from her obnoxious husband, and Fleabag from her suffering. And in the last moments of the finale, after a backyard wedding and the implosion of Claire’s marriage, Fleabag tells the Hot Priest that she loves him, and he tells her, “It’ll pass.” To anybody still reeling from the conclusion of this perfectly short-lived show, that’s also a message to us: This is the end, and one day it will feel like enough.

— Stephanie Bai, senior associate editor

***

Twin Peaks (streaming on Pluto TV and Paramount+)

Twin Peaks had multiple conclusions over its strange life as a TV show, first ending on a shocking second season cliff-hanger in 1991, then failing to resolve that with a follow-up film a year later, leaving fans feeling frustrated by what could have been. But in 2017, the co-creators David Lynch and Mark Frost delivered a magnificent and challenging third season with an even more mind-bending last episode. In the true finale of Twin Peaks, titled “Part 18” or “What Is Your Name?,” the heroic Special Agent Dale Cooper (played by Kyle MacLachlan) finally frees himself from the demonic possession that he’s been under for the entire season and travels back in time to the start of the show to try to undo Laura Palmer’s murder. Whatever he does, however, creates an entirely new world that seems even more confusing, and the screen cuts to black as some new version of Laura lets out a chilling scream. It’s another dramatic cliff-hanger, but this time a more intentional one, underlining the hubris in Cooper’s straight-arrow heroism: Try as he might to fix the world’s wrongs, its fundamental evil and suffering are impossible to scrub away.

— David Sims, staff writer

***

Nathan for You (streaming on HBO Max)

The overarching story of Nathan for You, the brilliant docu-comedy hosted by Nathan Fielder, is easy to miss. Fielder’s show ran for four seasons on an episodic premise: He uses his very minimal business acumen to help local entrepreneurs and store owners boost their foot traffic through absurd means that are clearly destined to fail. Fielder performs the role of a stoic, socially awkward, sometimes-cruel game master with aplomb, but amid all the tomfoolery is a very human through line: Fielder, the show implies, really just wants to connect.

That context explains why the series finale is a moving, feature-length meditation on love, remorse, and loneliness. “Finding Frances” focuses on a man named Bill Heath, who previously appeared on the show as the world’s least convincing Bill Gates impersonator. Fielder endeavors to reunite him with a long-lost old girlfriend, and the episode makes clear that he is afraid that he may eventually become Bill, who, in his 70s, is alone and full of regret, having funneled all of his energy into his career. The quest to locate the titular Frances is full of the usual contrivances, but it’s also sentimental and shockingly earnest. The very last scene—in which Fielder has to choose between his heart and his humor—ends the show with a reveal that rings poignant, even a little sad.

— Allegra Frank, senior editor

***

Cowboy Bebop (streaming on Crunchyroll)

This 1998 anime about bounty hunters adventuring through galaxies aboard a spaceship is nothing like its more famous Cartoon Network contemporaries Sailor Moon and Dragon Ball Z. Cowboy Bebop isn’t kid friendly (though I did first discover it at age 12): There is bloodshed, sex, and criminal activity, but most of all, there is the profoundly adult theme of running away from one’s past. Among the hunters is Spike, who split from a crime syndicate under circumstances I won’t spoil; Faye, a wanted amnesiac; Jet, the hulking captain, who lost a love; Ed, the quirky teenage hacker left by her father; and Ein, a corgi rescued from a lab.

For me, a perfect finale needs to feel both inevitable and surprising, and it needs to actually round out the story. Cowboy Bebop takes care to draw out every character’s past, and gives them arcs that befit their endings. This does mean that the found family you’ve grown attached to over the course of 26 episodes may not stay together in perpetuity. But I wouldn’t want to see the show finish any other way.

— Shan Wang, programming director

***

Insecure (streaming on HBO Max)

Issa Rae’s namesake character on Insecure routinely looks at herself in the mirror and talks to her alter ego. Her reflection is a little more outgoing and blunt than she is in real life, and in the series finale, that alter ego is once again laughing at her for a situation she put herself in: “You’re down bad. I don’t know where you go from here.” In real life, Issa replies that she just wants “to fast-forward to the part where everything is okay.”

But life is not lived in a series of highs. “One could collect the highest peaks of the whole world but put together they would not be a continent,” Zora Neale Hurston once wrote. “Just a collection of bristling peaks. No nuances of valleys and plains.” Insecure, as a show, follows the relationships and friendships of two Black women in Los Angeles, giving us a look into the minutiae of their daily lives and how big everything can seem. The finale, in contrast, is a series of vignettes showing each central character’s birthday at some point in the future—the moments when they think they have it all figured out, and the moments amid those highs when they remain insecure.

— Adam Harris, Radio Atlantic host

***

The O.C. (streaming on Hulu, Disney+, and HBO Max)

The last season of this popular early-2000s teen drama is somewhat controversial among fans. There are plenty of cringeworthy plotlines (Chris Pratt plays an animal-rights activist named Ché; a main character’s absent father suddenly reappears), but the finale manages to save the show from the mess it’s made. The episode follows Seth Cohen and Ryan Atwood, who was taken in by Seth’s family at the series’ start, as they all prepare to move out of the titular O.C.

The storyline provides closure while leaving just enough open-ended. A flash-forward in the final minutes allows viewers to catch a glimpse of the futures they have yearned to see for these characters: Seth and Summer get married; Ryan goes to college and later offers to help a young boy the way the Cohens once helped him. Set to Patrick Park’s “Life Is a Song,” the montage provides one last moving musical moment on a show known for them. It also delivers what I think all finales should: emotional payoff and an ending that feels earned.

— Kate Guarino, senior editor

***

The Jinx (streaming on HBO Max)

There has never been a finale like the Season 1 finale of The Jinx. The 2015 HBO documentary series investigated the 1982 disappearance of Kathie Durst, the wife of the real-estate heir Robert Durst, as well as the murders of two of his acquaintances. It sounds like your typical true-crime doc. It isn’t.

If, in the 11 years since it came out, you have by some miracle not been spoiled on what happens, do not read the rest of this blurb. I’m serious. To those in the know or stubborn enough to stay for the spoilers, I will say this: I have never been as shocked by anything on television as when Durst seemingly confesses on mic: “Killed them all, of course.”

I know I am bending the rules a bit here—technically, the Season 1 finale of The Jinx isn’t a series finale, but at the time, it was supposed to be. And the evidence revealed in that season directly contributed to Durst’s arrest and eventual murder conviction, which the show covered when it aired a second season nearly a decade later.

The Jinx ruined all other true-crime documentaries for me. If you aren’t going to actually catch the killer, why would I even watch?

— Julie Beck, staff writer

***

St. Elsewhere (available to rent on Prime Video and Apple TV+)

During its run in the 1980s, the NBC medical drama St. Elsewhere engaged in plenty of creative experiments. But the 1988 finale is a masterpiece, a loving homage to time-honored shows such as The Fugitive and M*A*S*H (an autopsy is performed on “patient 4077 … Blake, Henry”). Why so many inside jokes about old TV shows?

Because, as we find out in the show’s last few minutes, the entire series is merely the dream of an autistic boy named Tommy Westphall. The two top doctors at St. Elsewhere are actually, in Tommy’s real life, his grandfather and his construction-worker father, who wonder what Tommy thinks about all day while sitting in front of the TV and staring into a snow globe with a model of the hospital in it.

This amazing moment lives on: It has spawned years of internet theories about the “Tommy Westphall Universe.” If St. Elsewhere is a dream, what about all of the crossovers from other shows? The doctors of St. Elsewhere visit the bar from Cheers, which is also set in Boston; is that show part of Tommy’s fantasies?

It is a fine ending to a quirky series, and almost 40 years later, I still wonder whether so many shows I loved were just dreams in a snow globe.

— Tom Nichols, staff writer

Here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

• A Cold War movie that gives too much credit to Ronald Reagan
• A green light for crooks
• Alexandra Petri: Are the Patriot Games great? No. Are they fun to watch? Also no.

Today’s News

1. Luigi Mangione pleaded guilty to two federal charges of stalking that resulted in death and admitted that he had shot and killed UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in Manhattan in 2024. Federal prosecutors said that they will seek a life sentence; Mangione still faces a separate state murder charge and has a trial scheduled for next month.
2. President Trump said that the USS Abraham Lincoln’s deployment of more than 250 days was “not nearly long enough,” rejecting concerns raised by some sailors’ families and Democratic lawmakers about conditions aboard the carrier. The Lincoln, which has been supporting U.S. operations against Iran, is expected to be replaced in the Middle East by the USS George Washington.
3. Vice President Vance said yesterday that keeping oil and gas prices low is now the United States’ “goal No. 1” in the war with Iran, ahead of preventing Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon. Oil prices rose today after the U.S. threatened to indefinitely maintain its blockade of Iranian ports.

Dispatches

• The Books Briefing: Emma Sarappo explores a bleak, violent novel’s unexpected delights.

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More From The Atlantic

• Trump’s new plan to get his name back on the Kennedy Center
• Radio Atlantic: Longing for a time before smartphones
• Hollywood’s most indestructible superhero

Culture Break

Watch. The plot of One Night Only (out now in theaters) is extremely silly. It also contains a grain of truth about singlehood, Faith Hill argues.

Read. For 40 years, Richard Russo has served as America’s portraitist of left-behind people in hollowed-out places, Mark Oppenheimer writes. He examines how Russo’s latest novel, Under the Falls, approaches that same tradition.

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Rafaela Jinich contributed to this newsletter.

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