It’s either the best things or worst things that happen in threes.

When babies come in threes, their parents spend their lives on both sides of these cliches. Their kids’ milestones are met as a crowd: birthdays, braces, bickering. And then there’s that event you start worrying about nearly the minute multiples are born: paying all those college tuition bills at once.

The Scotts, the Pauls and the Craigs, three St. Louis-area families with triplets who graduated this year, have made it through the chaos of juggling the schedules of three high school seniors at once. Now, they’re dealing with three goodbyes.

Nichelle Scott, mom to triplets, first had to contend with the logistics of leaving. Her daughters, Sophie, Sydney and Sammie, each picked a different college far from home. Two had the exact same assigned move-in date and time slot. Nichelle ended up flying with Sydney to West Virginia University, while their dad drove Sophie to the University of Alabama. They helped Sammie move in at Regis University in Denver a couple of weeks later.

“Every other thing was shared until this moment,” Nichelle said. Now, “everyone is going to find their own identity.” Her daughters decided early on they were going to explore different paths for college.

It’s a similar situation for the Paul triplets, who are heading to various schools in Missouri. Michael will be attending Missouri State, Lauren is staying in town for St. Louis University and Bethany is going to the University of Central Missouri in Warrensburg. Their mom, Cindy Paul, said it has been strange to see other high schoolers go back to school, knowing her kids aren’t part of that anymore. She’s going to miss the noise and chatter and laughter that have filled their house.

“I won’t miss the laundry,” she laughed.

Surprisingly, they weren’t the only set of triplets in their graduating class. The Craigs spent a nonstop week helping their children move into their new housing. Their daughter Grace needed to arrive at the University of Kansas a week early for sorority rush. They moved her in on a Sunday, then drove back home to help Maggie pack and drive her to Purdue University. They drove home the next day only to head back to KU with Charlie. Their eldest child, Olivia, is starting her junior year at Ohio State, so as soon as they returned from dropping off Charlie in Kansas, they loaded up her stuff to drive to Ohio.

“My husband took a week’s vacation so we could take our kids to college,” Becky Craig said. She will be facing an empty nest in one fell swoop.

The rush of activities was constant in their lives. Every weekend, there were football games, tennis matches, lacrosse games, band competitions, she said. “I think our weekdays are going to be very quiet.”

She says she has worried about everything as they prepare to leave. The triplets have always had one another, and now one will be apart. Will she feel left out? Will the two at KU rely too heavily on each other?

There’s a powerful pull toward the number three. John Allen Paulos, a professor of mathematics at Temple University, writes in a column for ABCNews.com that there is a sort of numerical mysticism about it. It might be psychological, perhaps deriving from the structure and limited complexity of our brains, he suggests.

“The appeal of the trinity in Christianity and other religions, the philosophical triad of thesis, antithesis and synthesis, and even the setup of many jokes seem to stem in part from a natural resonance with the number three,” he writes. Humans seek patterns, and easily spotting threes offers a way to order a disordered world.

But three kids at once can make life complicated.

For the Scotts, parents’ weekend falls on the exact same dates for each of their freshmen.

Nichelle Scott cried when she saw the schedules. It set up an impossible choice.

“I’m not going to any, because I can’t make that decision,” she said.

A change that each of the moms mentioned was the transition from chaos to quiet in their homes: walking into a clean house, making meals for just two people, filling the sudden surplus of downtime.

“Although I am extremely happy and proud of my triplets, I will have an ache in my heart every day at 2:45 p.m. when they don’t burst through that door at home,” Cindy Paul said.

For now, it’s time to say goodbye.

A war broke out over a lost T-shirt on our summer vacation.

I had spotted a vintage-looking tee at a hipster shop in the historic Distillery District during a recent visit to Toronto. It featured a graphic design of a bucket of poutine. For the unfamiliar, which we were until this trip, poutine is Canada’s heavenly version of hangover food -- fries drenched in gravy and loaded with cheese curds. My teenage daughter had already ordered the dish twice in the past two days. I suggested it would be a good souvenir that she ought to buy for herself.

The girl balked at the price -- $30 Canadian, or about $23 American. That seems pricey for a T-shirt, she said. I pointed out that she had money saved from babysitting jobs, and it was worth it to splurge on a memento that would remind her of a delicious highlight of the trip.

I mean, I wasn’t going to pay for it, but she should.

She did really like the shirt, so she shelled out the money.

An undercurrent of tension had been building on the trip over maternal expectations and the inevitable teenage daughter resistance to them. Typical things like her looking at the phone when I felt like she should have been more engaged with us. When it was time to pack up our stuff and move on to the next leg of our trip, I told both kids to make sure they had all their things. So, of course, at our next stop the girl said she couldn’t find her new shirt.

I advised her to look through the dirty laundry bag, which I saw her rummage through. I felt like I was being blamed for the misplaced item, and she snapped at me when I asked a question about the upcoming school year.

It escalated from there. I yelled, she cried. We eventually talked it out, but it kind of ruined the morning. Before we headed out for the day’s activities, I went online and found a similar shirt and decided to order it and surprise her at home.

Our family met up with the friends we were traveling with, and on the bus ride to a Niagara Falls attraction, I confided in my friend about the scene that morning. As a good friend ought to do, she called out the exact doubt that had been niggling at me. Was it wise to replace an item lost to a child’s carelessness?

“Would your parents have replaced the shirt for you?” she asked.

“No way,” I said. In fact, my own mother would have considered a $25 T-shirt a big waste of money. Are we enabling our children when we bail them out like this? Shouldn’t they suffer the consequences of their mistakes so they are more careful next time?

She wasn’t judging me, and confessed that she had done similar things for her own children, but it was worth thinking about what was driving us to diverge from our own upbringing in this way.

I had rationalized the purchase by reminding myself that I had pushed her to buy it. Her anti-materialistic, anti-consumption nature can seem a bit alien to me, since I have to actively fight the urge to buy things that are clearly not necessities.

Fights about trivial things, like the shirt, escalate when they become an indictment against which one must defend one’s self. Parenting is actually a series of these little moments. A harsh exchange that is really about a million other things than the argument at hand. Making things personal that aren’t. And then trying to make up for falling short of our best selves.

Replacing the lost shirt was a peace offering.

It was also a way of granting her forgiveness that I can’t give myself. I relate too closely to misplacing things. In the space of a week, I had left my FitBit in the gym shower (it was never returned), a favorite pair of wedges in a hotel room (lost forever), and a new book I was reading in transit somewhere. This sort of absent-mindedness has haunted me since I was a child. It makes me feel guilty and mad at myself. So much so that I often refuse to replace the lost items as a self-inflicted form of punishment.

It feels so wasteful, which, growing up, was one of the worst possible sins in our home. When I see my daughter lose track of her things, I worry that I’ve passed on this defective gene.

I asked my husband later if he would have bought another shirt for her. (His parents would have reacted the same as mine.)

“Yes, probably,” he said. “But you would have gotten mad at me for doing it, so I would have done it secretly.”

That sounded uncomfortably true.

My daughter overheard me talking to my friend.

“Wait. What did you do?” she asked.

“I found the shirt online, and I ordered a new one for you,” I said, expecting a warm hug.

“Why did you do that?!” she said. “I found the shirt in the dirty laundry bag this morning!” I had told her several times to check the laundry bag.

“Oh my God, why didn’t you tell me?” I asked.

“I thought you were already so mad at me.”

Then, she did hug me.

Perhaps we have more in common than matching poutine shirts.

For months, the headlines have been thumbs-down -- way down -- for Facebook.

Its historic stock market plunge followed an epic privacy breach, misinformation campaigns that skewed our last election, bad actors fomenting violence, and evidence that teens are fleeing the social networking behemoth.

But there could be an unexpected silver lining in this avalanche of bad news. It can be used to make a compelling case to younger audiences about trustworthy information sources, and make them more discerning than older generations about what’s real and fake on the internet.

News-consumption habits form early, and the post-millennials are still up for grabs as news consumers. Legitimate news organizations, responsible corporate citizens and concerned parents and educators have an opportunity to influence the long game in protecting our democracy by teaching this generation about reputable sources of information.

It’s better for everyone if teens aren’t exposed to malicious, fake content posing as news on Facebook. But even if Facebook doesn’t make changes to its content rules, teenagers are abandoning the site, according to a study from the Pew Research Center. Just 51 percent of Americans aged 13 to 17 said they use Facebook -- down from the 71 percent in Pew’s previous study in 2015. They are likely leaving because their parents and grandparents are on it. They prefer YouTube, Instagram (also owned by Facebook) or Snapchat.

While media-savvy teens are certainly aware that bad information takes root and spreads socially, it’s just as important that they learn why. If your local newspaper published the views of those who deny the Holocaust or claim mass shootings like Sandy Hook were staged, those views would be put into proper context as untrue conspiracies. News companies have a vested interest in the truth. That credibility is what eventually gets monetized.

Social media companies, however, have a vested interest in growing users and engagement, which can be sold to advertisers. Truth, accuracy and quality have not entered this equation. This is why malicious liars, bigots and harassers can find a megaphone and an audience of millions on social media sites.

Facebook’s inability, or unwillingness, to prevent its massive platform from being used for nefarious purposes has been on display for some time. But Zuckerberg is hardly alone in this calculation. Twitter hasn’t been serious about tackling its Nazi problem; YouTube has been a safe haven for fake and malicious content.

These tech giants are not invested in our country’s democratic values -- they care about their bottom line. This differentiation must be explained as part of every middle school and high school English lesson on sources of information.

And legitimate news organizations, who have relied on Facebook for traffic, should build younger audiences on Instagram and YouTube with more savvy. Take, for instance, the top news publishers on Instagram. The New York Times has 4 million subscribers and its feed heavily features compelling photography that plays well on the visual site. The Fox News feed, with half as many subscribers as the Times, features quotes that promote and praise the current administration’s policies.

Teenagers should be shown the differences in motive and approach to news.

Local media, in particular, can benefit from greater exposure through distribution apps like Apple News, the built-in news app on iOS, which aggregates and curates stories from a variety of third-party sources. Parents can make sure the news alerts on their teens’ phones are turned on -- even if they are just glancing at the headlines of the day.

In addition, corporations can be pressured not to run ads with brokers of misinformation, bigotry and harassment, who say vile, repulsive things about murdered children and their grieving parents. We can demand better, as consumers and citizens.

As long as social media sites remain “neutral” on truth and lies, we should cheer when our children dump them.