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Bus driver comforts scared boy on his first day of kindergarten in heartwarming photo

Amy Johnson

The first day of school can be both exciting and scary at the same time — especially if it's your first day ever, as was the case for a nervous four-year-old in Wisconsin. But with a little help from a kind bus driver, he was able to get over his fear.

Axel was "super excited" waiting for the bus in Augusta with his mom, Amy Johnson, until it came time to actually get on.

"He was all smiles when he saw me around the corner and I started to slow down and that's when you could see his face start to change," his bus driver, Isabel "Izzy" Lane, told WEAU.

The scared boy wouldn't get on the bus without help from his mom, so she picked him up and carried him aboard, trying to give him a pep talk.

"He started to cling to me and I told him, 'Buddy, you got this and will have so much fun!'" Johnson told Fox 7.

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Teacher's viral 'baggage activity' brought her students to tears

What a beautiful idea.

Karen Wunderlich Loewe/Facebook

Update from the author: I wrote a follow-up to this article sharing a trauma-informed perspective of the activity. You can read it here.

Karen Loewe has been teaching for 22 years. Clearly, all of that experience has given her a solid bead on what her students really need.

The middle school English teacher from Oklahoma shared an activity she did with her students for the first day of school on Facebook and it's gone insanely viral. In just three days, her post has already been shared more than 335,000 times.

What has caught people's attention is something we all have in common—emotional baggage. We live in an era of rising mental health awareness, but also increased social pressures to appear as if you have all of your sh*t together. For kids in the turbulent middle school years, whose their bodies, minds, and spirits are growing at breakneck pace, having a place to share their emotional turmoil can be incredibly helpful. But many kids don't have a safe, supportive place to do that.

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The American Psychological Association says bigotry and gun laws are to blame for mass shootings, not 'mental illness'

Any time a mass shooting occurs in America—which is basically every week at this point—hoards of people start blaming "mental health." Despite the fact that every other developed nation also has people with mental illnesses and nowhere near our mass shooting numbers, mental health becomes the scapegoat for people who insist that gun violence has nothing to do with guns.

On the surface, it may seem like a plausible enough theory. After all, no one in a sane state of mind walks into a concert, a shopping center, or a place of worship and starts shooting people randomly. Such folks are clearly not right in the head, so "mental health" seems like a logical place to go.

RELATED: Twice as many American children die from gun violence as police officers and soldiers combined

But according to the American Psychological Association—the actual experts in mental health—that blame is misplaced. Instead, they say, the toxic combination of "easy access to assault weapons and hateful rhetoric" and the "negative cognitive and behavioral effects" of racism are the ills that we really need to be addressing if we want to stop mass killings.

APA President Rosie Phillips Davis, PhD, released the following statement on the shootings in El Paso and Dayton. It's worth reading in full:

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We didn't always turn left the way we do now. What changed?

Unless you're a child, New York City resident, or UPS driver, chances are you've made a left turn in your car at least once this week.

Chances are, you didn't think too much about how you did it or why you did it that way.

You just clicked on your turn signal...

...and turned left.

GIF from United States Auto Club.

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