Panic attacks, cold sweats, violent mood swings, feelings of hopelessness. It can mean only one thing: the beginning of a new school year.
And it's not any old new school year either. It's the big one, the one that makes all the difference, the one on which judgment will be made for decades to come.
It is the start of life at "big" school for our eldest daughter. The relative sanctuary and sanity of primary school has gone and she stands at the threshold of that phase in growing up when childhood collides so brutally with adolescence.
You, too, may have a daughter or a son in the same boat. In Birmingham alone there are thousands of us, hoping and praying our children fall in with a good crowd and don't chum up with the offspring of local gang leaders and people traffickers.
By now, you should be word perfect with the new school's mission statement and its truancy policy and have a sound working knowledge of its inclusivity agenda. Your wife/husband/partner/nominated carer should have sewed name tags into new ties and gym kits, one of the few rituals to have survived the draconian liberalism that did for classroom dunces caps, asbestos shower blocks, the nit nurse and the headmaster's slipper.
Some back-to-school decisions still haven't been resolved in our household, my wife invoking executive orders for the purchase of a school bag, a pencil case and dual power calculator.
One of the main outstanding matters relates to the contentious issue of packed lunches versus school dinners. I favour the latter as it will mean there will be one less sandwich for me to make every weekday night. If there is one thing more boring than preparing your own Tupperware box, it's preparing someone else's, especially when they are allowed home-made cake.
My wife, however, has expressed concerns about the inflationary pressures of canteen purchased panninis and fruit smoothies. Her most recent declaration was: "If you want to fork out an extra 40 quid a month for bloody school dinners, you go ahead. Just don't blame me when we're skint by October ..."
According to all the surveys, these concerns should be the tip of our pre-school iceberg of worries. Self-serving "parenting" websites and quack magazine psychologists claim all manner of pitfalls lie ahead for our girl. For a start, there are the tell-tale signs of eating disorders to watch out for while keeping an ear open for the ticking timebomb of childhood obesity.
If a child doesn't starve or eat themselves to death before sitting their GCSEs there is a cavalcade of other catastrophes waiting to strike, according to the experts. There's binge drinking, self-harm (teen polls suggest one in three children take part in "cutting"), drug abuse, drug trafficking, underage sex, paedophile teachers, forced marriages, internet grooming, religious persecution, online bullying and happy-slapping.
Given all the hype these issues attract it is remarkable any child completes their secondary education unscathed. The fact is, however, that going to big school is neither any more or any less perilous than it was 20, 30 or 40 years ago. It is just that we, as parents, worry so much more about what might happen, as if dwelling on the threats posed to our children will in some way diminish the chances of them falling into harm's way, thereby bringing misery to us.
This is a great pity. Joining secondary school should be a time of creative, intellectual and emotion enlightenment for children, not a cue for indulgent paralysis among parents.