Families: Parting with Less Sorrow

Her first day of kindergarten was so awful that 40 years later, Stephanie Johnson remembers every miserable detail. Raised by a stay-at-home mother, she had never spent much time with kids her age before. Arriving at school late, she endured the cold, silent stares of 30 other children as the teacher found her a seat. When her mother abruptly vanished, she felt abandoned, and her sniffling escalated into wails. "I felt like a garbage can deposited at the curb on trash day," she recalls.

She was determined that her son Jeremy would fare better. So the year before he was to...