Slate Magazine81%
“Graduation Creep” Is Coming for Kids. Parents Are Exhausted. 59%
By Kate Lindsay0%
6/28/2026, 2:40:00 AM
BS Summary: This article contains 31 faulty reasoning types, including Hasty Generalization, Anecdotal, and Pessimism Bias, with Negativity Bias as the most egregious example at 31.4% saturation with 289 hits. Analysis detected 2,078 faulty-reasoning hits from 919 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 47% and a BS Rank of 59% (12,760 of 30,584 articles). This article is worse (more manipulative) than 58.30% of the article peer group.
The parents of this year’s graduating class have some complaints.
For one, a number of schools didn’t even give out certificates.
Another school informed parents that it would not be providing the students with caps and gowns.
(The parents decided to pay for their own, as well as an accompanying photo shoot.)
It’s not fair: What made their children different from the hundreds of thousands of others walking across auditorium stages this summer?
Other than the minor fact that, well, yes, theirs are in kindergarten.
Graduation season has always been marked by social media posts and hordes of billowing gowns descending onto the streets, but you’d be right to feel that the celebrations in recent years have become more overwhelming than usual.
The traditional graduation ceremony, once reserved for college, high school, *maybe* middle school, has not only gotten younger but multiplied, requiring the end of almost every school year to be marked by an in-person event with increasingly elaborate fanfare.
Previously, events like these may have been referred to as “moving-up” or “stepping-up” ceremonies and involved little more than a sing-along and some remarks from the teacher.
Now, however, they’re ticketed occasions, with processions, diplomas, props, and professional photographers.
The kids wear miniature caps and gowns, while parents mingle at a reception.
With any luck, the child won’t outgrow their formal wear *too* much by next year, when, most likely, they’ll be graduating all over again.
Neither the parents nor the teachers I spoke to could point to any one reason for “graduation creep”: gentle parenting, a postpandemic rebound for in-person events, the need for social media documentation—take your pick.
They’ve all converged into a perfect, sticky storm of confusion, anxiety, and jealousy that may not be about the students at all.
“It’s very much for the parents,” another elementary school educator, who works at an independent school, told me.
“It’s sort of like, ‘We’re spending a whole bunch of money to send our child here, and we would like to see something at the end of the year for our financial efforts.’
”
It’s not just rich, entitled parents who are demanding that their child be handed a diploma before they can even spell *diploma*.
One public elementary school teacher laments the phenomenon of the one enthusiastic parent who can create an expectation that spreads like wildfire.
“One of the moms was like, ‘Can we please organize something?
I have glow sticks, and I can print certificates,’ ” the teacher told me.
“And I’m like, ‘Do you know how much planning it takes to get kindergartners to just stand in a line?’
”
They do it anyway, and as the photos and stories appear on social media, parents from other schools catch wind of the tradition and wonder why their children didn’t get the same.
“I know it might seem silly, but I feel sad we didn’t get to see him sing a silly song or wear a cap and gown,” Lindsey Stanberry, a mother in Brooklyn, says of her son, who was in pre-K during COVID-19 and whose kindergarten did not offer a ceremony.
“Those milestones just fly by, and it’s special to be able to celebrate them.”
Not all parents are as enthusiastic.
For younger kids, the ceremonies often take place in the mornings—not before work, but also not late enough that it would make sense for a parent to go in to work either.
A quick glance at Brooklyn ceremony start times alone suggests that they run the gamut: 9 a.m., 10 a.m., 11 a.m., 12 p.m., 12:30 p.m., indoor and outdoor, ranging from just half an hour to a full hour and a half.
Plus, graduation often arrives after a slew of other demanding end-of-year activities, as recently satirized by Bess Kalb.
(“June 21st: Beach Day!
The bus for the beach will leave from The Port Authority at 7am.
Pickup is directly from the beach at 11am.”)
Arielle, the elementary school mom of two, has to fight for that kind of flexibility in her schedule as a nurse.
“It is unfortunately one of these areas where there often tends to be a divide,” she said.
“For people like us, it just feels very relentless.”
Mary Childs, a mother of three from Richmond, Virginia, said, “In a perfect world, yes, I would love to show up every day to my kids’ school with hot cookies and books to read and be a supplemental teacher.”
She added, “But my full other personality has a job that I want and need to do in part to pay for all the childcare.”
Even if the logistics bear out, there’s also an existential risk.
By the time a child has been through pre-K, kindergarten, first, fifth, and eighth grade graduations, will their high school or college graduation still feel meaningful?
They certainly don’t start that way, with both teachers and parents reporting that their kids seemed mostly indifferent to whatever ceremony their schools provided, no matter how dazzling.
Despite the attempts to imbue each and every accomplishment with significance, the children may never end up feeling significant at all.
And yet, when the independent school educator was given the opportunity for her own son to participate in the aforementioned cap-and-gown photo shoot, she of course said yes.
It was the first time they could get a photo as a family of four.
Parents, she acknowledged, are susceptible to FOMO and envy.
“The child,” she said, “is none the wiser.”
Speakers
3speakers17%attributed speech766writer words
Selected voice
78%flagged-word coverageLindsey Stanberry
64 attributed words42% of attributed speech95% writer coverage
Attribution is sentence-level. Pattern percentages are calculated only from words assigned to that voice.
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Analysis
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