Nothing breaks. The cards do not expire, the schedule does not reset, and no progress is lost. A fortnight's gap clears in under a week of ordinary sessions — and the recovery needs no heroics, which is the whole point.
At a glance
| What happens | |
|---|---|
| Cards you miss | Become overdue and wait |
| What the queue shows | The 20 most overdue, never more |
| Progress lost | None |
| Penalty | None |
| Time to clear a fortnight | Under a week of normal sessions |
| What to do | Twenty a day, as usual |
| What not to do | A catch-up marathon |
Why nothing is lost
A spaced-repetition schedule is a set of estimates about when a memory will need refreshing. Missing the estimate by a few days is not a failure condition — the memory does not vanish on the due date, it just continues fading.
So an overdue card is simply a card that is now a bit harder than it would have been. Your child reviews it, grades it honestly, and the schedule carries on from there. If it has faded, they press Tricky, the card restarts its ladder, and the system responds correctly by bringing it back sooner. That is the mechanism working, not the mechanism being damaged.
Why there is never a wall
This is where we differ sharply from most flashcard tools, and it is deliberate.
Anki's daily limit defaults to 200 reviews, so a fortnight away can produce a screen with several hundred cards due. Adults find this demoralising and often abandon the collection. For a child the number is worse than demoralising — it reads as an accusation, and it reads as being about them rather than about arithmetic.
Our queue never shows more than twenty cards. Miss two weeks and there is no pile: there are twenty cards today, twenty tomorrow, most-overdue first, until it is gone. Your child cannot see a backlog, because seeing it is the thing that does the damage.
The maths is undramatic. A collection with, say, sixty cards accumulated over a fortnight clears in three days of ordinary sessions while still leaving room for the day's genuinely due cards.
What not to do
No catch-up marathon. An hour of forced reviews is exactly the experience that ends a habit, and it produces careless grading — a child pressing Got it on everything to get through, which corrupts the schedule far more than the delay did. If you take one thing from this article: the recovery from a gap is a normal session, repeated.
No comment about the gap. The system has no opinion about missed days and neither should the house. A child who returns to a lapsed habit and is met with a remark about it has been given a reason not to return next time.
No reset. Some people's instinct after a long gap is to start fresh. Do not — the review history is what makes the schedule accurate, and it is also what tells the tutor which ideas your child has found hard.
When the gap is really long
A fortnight is routine. A term is different, and worth handling deliberately.
After several months away, many cards will genuinely have faded, so the first week or two of sessions will feel harder and produce more Tricky grades than usual. That is honest and fine — the cards restart their ladders and the collection rebuilds.
This is also the right moment for a tidy-up. Some of those cards will be about topics that have moved on entirely, and there is no sense rebuilding a memory your child does not need. Putting them away takes them out of rotation without destroying anything, and the collection that remains is one they can actually maintain.
If a card turns out to be about something they do still need but have lost completely, the better response is not more drilling — it is a tutoring session on the idea. A card can test knowledge; it cannot reinstall it.
The design principle underneath
Every choice here comes from one observation: the failure mode of spaced repetition is not forgetting, it is quitting.
A child who reviews imperfectly for a year learns vastly more than one who reviews perfectly for six weeks and then stops. So the system is built to be resumable — no streaks to break, no backlog to face, no penalty to absorb, no configuration to repair. The cost of coming back is always the same six minutes it was before.
FAQ
What happens if my child misses two weeks of reviews?
Nothing is lost. Cards become overdue and are served oldest-first, twenty a day, until the backlog clears. There is no penalty and no reset.
Should they do a catch-up marathon?
No. Long forced sessions are the thing that ends habits, and a rushed session produces careless grades that corrupt the schedule. Twenty a day clears a fortnight in under a week.
Does a late review make the card less effective?
Barely. Spaced repetition is tolerant of approximate timing — a card reviewed on day 20 instead of day 15 is fine. Reviewing late is far better than not reviewing.