The afternoon is very hot in Washington DC, but that is not the reason why you do not see children or elderly people. The city is usually like this. As the seat of the federal government, Congress, and so many companies and institutions around it, the American capital is a magnet for recent graduates and young professionals who lower the city's average age and turn its landscape into almost that of a TV series. Retiring here is not the most common thing, but Carmen and Ralph Van Roy wouldn't change it for anything.

Orelletes is a rabbit who is starting preschool (I3) and experiences it with the same intensity as many children who are entering a school for the first time. He cries, he doesn't like saying goodbye to his parents, he finds it hard to share toys, and he prefers to play alone, so he hides in a corner. With a lot of tact, the teacher helps him to breathe, to be calm, and he ends up joining the circle with the rest of the group. He is the protagonist of Orelletes at school, a story that aims to help experience this process from a kinder and more conscious space. Self-published by preschool teacher Meritxell Casanova, the story empathizes with the child and gives advice to parents to make these first weeks of schooling easier.

Well, that's it. This week we are going back to school and even though, for the sake of appearances, teachers and students keep saying "how lazy we are and how little desire we have," the reality is that we are always excited (even if just a little bit) to start over. Starting a new school year is like falling in love again: new clothes, organizing plans, the desire to do it well. This year, yes.

Siblings dressed the same: the same t-shirt, the same trousers and matching shoes. Sisters with the same dress and the same hairstyle. In many families, dressing siblings the same has a practical, almost logistical, sense, although it often also responds to an aesthetic issue.

I have worked in schools that separated by learning levels and others that did not. It is evident that in a graduating class, students learn, evolve, and mature at different paces. This is what we now call diversity. But there are many types of diversity. They can be due to learning capacity or autism, hyperactivity, motor difficulties, vision, hearing, and so on. All options have been channeled into so-called inclusive schools and institutes. An interesting debate would be whether this option (with adequate resources) is still better than not having specific centers for this type of student. It is not about segregation, but about offering the best possible attention to our children. However, we have always taken into account students who have difficulties. The most classic option to prevent them from falling behind in their studies is to offer them support groups. Students in support groups must have their curriculum adapted, and the agreement is signed by the families. This is what we call an individualized plan. The aim is that, within their capabilities, that student can progress and obtain, like the others, a school diploma. In certain cases, it is also taken into account in high school.

The writer and secondary school teacher Roc Casagran doesn't have many memories of primary school. He would summarize it as a few years in which he had a good time, played and enjoyed himself with friends, "which is what it was all about," he points out, and learned from his teachers: "I barely remember specific activities, except for mental calculation exercises, which I really liked. The important thing there was speed, they gave us 10 mental calculation problems and you had to answer quickly." It surprises him to remember precisely that, considering that he later leaned towards literature. "You know that adults tend to compartmentalize learning, but I like and liked reading and writing and also calculation; it's not incompatible," he assures. Until the first year of primary school he was enrolled at the Escola Nostra Llar in Sabadell. His parents have spoken to him several times about the teachers he had, wonderful professionals with whom he began the process of learning to read and write. "It's a shame I don't remember them, because I learned a lot from them," he comments. Then he went to Joanot Alisanda School, a school with a huge playground compared to the previous one, and which he took advantage of to play football: "I always stayed for lunch; this meant having more time to play and do our own thing. Playing, sweating, and having a good time." What he remembers most from this stage is when he discovered Paco Ibáñez and poetry in general. "It must have been in third or fourth grade, in Spanish class, when they played a song by Paco Ibáñez, and I loved it," he admits. Just as he is unable to name any teacher who marked him from primary school, from secondary school, at the Institut Pau Vila, also public and also from Sabadell, he already has more memories. Here he has more present the classes of the language teachers in general, and more specifically those of Antoni Dalmases, who is also a writer: "He was one of those who not only spoke to you about language and literature. I really liked the teachers who dedicated time to other topics that were not strictly the subject, they spoke about current events and dropped reflections," he comments. At the time, it seemed to him that perhaps they were not very relevant, but, even so, he was interested in the less academic "content" and especially that they treated him not as a small child, but as an almost adult. Another of the teachers who went beyond the content was the writer and Latin teacher, Antoni Pladevall, with whom they spoke about current events and politics.

Maria (40 years old) barely remembers how many years she has been living in Burkina Faso, a West African country. “About 15 or 16, I don't know anymore,” she tells me now, from the house where she lives in the capital, Ouagadougou. Axel, her eldest son, is restless because he wants to play, and the youngest, Jordi, who is not yet a year old, has taken his first steps these days. Her husband, Thierry, also lives at home with them, and they have a dog. The family, however, like almost all African families, is extended and within the four walls of the house there is always someone visiting. A cousin, a brother, a niece, or a sister-in-law. “You can wake up one day and have people sleeping in the living room, it’s very common,” Maria tells me.

Among the thousands of books and parenting manuals that currently fill bookstores, we come across the brief essay En la era de los niños cosa:Ensayos contra la crianza como emprendimiento, by Santiago Gerchunoff (Buenos Aires, 1977), where the philosopher, writer, and university and high school professor dissects current parenting and how it has become professionalized to the point that children have become objects to be improved. The book is a collection of short essays he wrote some time ago while raising his daughters, who are now 13 and 19 years old, readapted with a common thread: the concept of thing-children.What are thing children?

The same Mediterranean that for some families is synonymous with holidays, beach, and long afternoons is today, for others, the memory of a life that no longer exists. A few kilometers away, two realities coexist before the same blue horizon. In Gaza, the Jneid family looks at the sea from a tent set up on the coast. In Tel Aviv, families go down to the beach when the workday ends and try to hold onto an idea of summer that, since October 7, 2023, is no longer exactly the same.The voice of Naeem Mohammed Jneid, known as Abu Obaida, comes from a reality that is difficult to imagine from the other side of the Mediterranean. Throughout his life, he has worked with a clear idea: to build a stable future for his children. Before the war, he had managed to turn the family business into the center of daily life. He owned a supermarket where his children worked and a farm with about 1,500 chickens.But the memory that Abu Obaida holds most strongly is that of summer. Before the war changed the streets, the houses, and the routines, the arrival of the heat meant one simple thing: being together. "We used to go to the sea as a complete family. It was our time to rest and enjoy," he recalls. Summer was also the time for weddings and celebrations. Among all the memories, there is one he holds especially dear: his son's wedding. "It was like a festival. All the family and friends came. There were singers, a stage, and everyone he loved was there."Today that life no longer exists. The family home, 240 square meters in Jabalia, in the north of the Strip, was destroyed, according to the family, during the war. One of their sons, Amr, died in July 2024 while looking for products to maintain the small business they had set up during their displacement to Deir al-Balah, in the center of Gaza. Now, Abu Obaida lives with part of his family in a tent in Gaza City, on the same coast where they used to spend summer afternoons. "Our house was large, it was equipped and had air conditioning. It was a place where we could be calm," he explains. Now, the feeling is of living "practically on the street". "We have no security or stability. Anyone can enter the tent. There are rodents, stray dogs, mosquitoes... My grandchildren are sometimes even afraid to go out to go to the bathroom," he adds.Their days begin before the sun rises. Around six in the morning, the family goes out to queue for water and then waits at the food distribution points. In the afternoon, the children collect firewood to be able to cook and, when they can, they try to continue learning in improvised educational activities. Despite everything, Abu Obaida still imagines a normal summer afternoon: a table full of fruit and drinks and, most importantly, with the whole family gathered.

The author Regina Rodríguez Sirvent has become one of the most powerful and fun voices in Catalan literature. After the phenomenon of Les calces al sol with more than 100,000 copies sold, she is now releasing Crispetes de matinada, in which her childhood friends are crucial characters and play a decisive role in the novel's plot. Because when Regina talks about her time at school, her first thought goes directly to her friends. “School is the foundation of my deepest friendships, it's the most important thing that happened to me and I keep all my school friends. With my friends, we have been very daring and very mischievous. We even opened the teachers' lounge to look for our grades, add extra positives, and we even photocopied exams!”

Non-motherhood is also a grief, a grief that tends to be silenced. Midwife Gloria Labay has suffered it and explains in her new book, Ser sin ser madre (Lunwerg), how she has experienced it from a double perspective: that of a woman who wanted to be a mother and could not, and that of a midwife who has spent years accompanying the motherhood of other women.

Vladimir Putin wants to turn large families into the traditional Russian family. But while only 5% of households are made up of a father, a mother, and three or more children, almost 40% of families are single-parent and, in the vast majority of cases, matriarchal. Katia and Anya – fictitious names to preserve their anonymity –, a mother and daughter aged 45 and 11 respectively, are an example of this archetypal model in a society historically marked by high male mortality, the central role of women in care, and, after the fall of the USSR, by high divorce rates.

Mari Pau Huguet (Estopanyà, 1963) is known for a professional life dedicated to Televisió de Catalunya. There she began her career and very likely it is also there where she will end it. But few know that she spent her entire childhood in the La Bordeta neighbourhood of Lleida. These were the sixties and seventies of the last century, when everything still happened in the street. “It was like living in a village, we didn't have a television and we spent the day playing outside the house,” recalls the journalist. These were times when she socialised with both boys and girls in all sorts of popular games, “like rope skipping, the handkerchief game and strong horse...”, she remembers.

She studied journalism but soon continued with anthropology studies that have taken her to Australia, where she has obtained her doctorate, and where she lives and works. Anna Molas (Barcelona, 1991) has turned her doctoral thesis on egg donation in Spain into a book, Taming Egg Donors: The Egg Donation Reproductive Market in Spain (Palgrave, 2025), which raises many questions and calls for rethinking one of the most frequent assisted reproduction techniques. The first time she encountered egg donation was over ten years ago when an advertisement to be an egg donor appeared on a job search portal. "On the one hand, I got angry – I was looking for a job, why was this coming to me? – and, on the other hand, it also generated many questions for me. That lit the fuse".

In 1999, coinciding with the total solar eclipse visible in a small strip of the United Kingdom – the first in over seventy years – the Morgan family gathered in St. Davids, in the Welsh county of Pembrokeshire. Among those present were some elderly relatives who remembered the 1927 eclipse. "But, as often happens in the United Kingdom, the clouds prevented us from seeing the spectacle. Nevertheless, the most vivid memory is not of the missed eclipse, but of the family reunion".

It was during the pandemic that Núria Casas installed the TikTok app and dared to make videos caricaturing different types of mothers, teachers, or comparisons about how school was a few years ago and how it is now. A direct and realistic format that has connected enormously with the public and has become her current job as a content creator.

Teo's weekends are usually spent among parks, slides, and trains. At almost two years old, any outing is an adventure, especially if it includes a visit to a train station. Neus Modoro and Kiyofumi Kurata try to make the most of their free days to spend time as a family, whether playing in one of Tokyo's many green spaces, visiting a zoo or museum, or occasionally taking a trip to Osaka to see his paternal grandparents. Theirs is an apparently ordinary family life, but marked by a reality that combines languages, references, and customs from two ends of Eurasia.

Many know the incredible story of overcoming of the Lleida pilot Isidre Esteve who, after becoming paraplegic from a motorcycle accident in 2007, it was transformed into a regular competitor in car rally raids, especially at the Dakar. But few know that his childhood in his native Oliana (in the Alt Urgell region) was crucial in forging a personality based on effort and respect for teachers and parents.

His own experience has led Hatim Azahri Akhnous, 28, to dedicate his life to transforming the reality of the most vulnerable people. A higher technician in social integration and a student of social work at the UB, in 2019 he founded the association Joves Units del Poble-Sec with the aim of generating real opportunities for young people in the neighborhood at risk of exclusion. Since last year he has been a trustee of Equitat.org (formerly Fundació Bofill) and this year he has been awarded the Princess of Girona Prize in the Social category and has participated in the VI meeting of Lafede Changing education to change the world.