Warning, Meltdown Imminent: Handling Holiday Hiccups
If it hasn’t happened yet, there’s a good chance it will?soon
Somebody’s bound to lose their?cool
If your family has been doing a lot of visiting, eating a lot of rich foods, and having a lot of late nights (like many have over the holidays), please go easy on yourselves, your partners, and your children.
Our kids are probably having a lot of fun, but they (we all) may also be eating a lot of treats, experiencing a lot of overstimulation, and not getting enough sleep.
It’s unsurprising then, that may of us (adults and children alike) have a difficult time over the holidays. If your child, loved one, or you yourself have a meltdown, please try to be patient and understanding.
We do not all have the same capacity to just “roll with” all of these changes in routine and social expectations. Kids especially do not yet have the neurological development or maturity to be proactive and plan ahead for these possibilities, so it is our job to do that for them.
Our children also frequently do not have a choice about where and with whom we visit, what time we leave, and how many social gatherings we attend over the holidays. They are often at the mercy of the adults in their lives to recognize, validate, and support their kids in recognizing their limits.
Be fair and realistic
Please maintain realistic and fair expectations of your loved ones. There is a lot of social pressure about how we’re “supposed” to celebrate and behave during the holidays, please don’t add to it by expecting your loved one to “suck it up” and force themselves to endure if it becomes too much for them.
What often happens then, is our kids do have meltdowns, because everyone has a limit to what they can tolerate, and are then punished for the behaviour that results.
Is it really fair if we push our kids to their limits, and then punish them when they exceed them and can no longer control their big feelings?
I think you all know what my answer is to that.
Our holiday?hiccup
Recently my son had a minor mini-meltdown — I wouldn’t call it a meltdown, but I definitely don’t want to call it a tantrum. It was just a difficult period over about an hour or so.
Anyway, he said some things I didn’t like. I started out being very patient, understanding that the holidays are a lot for all of us, and that we were all tired.
We also have family in another province. We’ve connected with them by video chat, but were not able to visit in person this year, so it’s hard for our son to see his cousins, aunts, uncles, and grandparents all gathered for a holiday meal while he’s stuck at home with his “boring old” parents.
As can happen to anyone, my patience reached its limit, and I told him to “go to his room” in an authoritative tone. This is something I try very hard to avoid resorting to when he’s emotional, because I don’t want to send the message that he will be sent away when he’s dealing with big feelings, and left to deal with them himself.
What I needed was a moment to regain my own composure, and it seemed that’s exactly what he needed as well. So in hindsight, I know it would have been more helpful to express it as taking all of us taking a break and returning to the conversation when were all regulated.
That’s definitely not how I put it in that moment.
When I had cooled off, I went up to speak with him. My son was being very hard on himself, psychologically beating himself up for how he had behaved, saying he “couldn’t do anything right”.
I observed that he had handled all of the excitement, socializing, change in routine, and everything ghat comes with the holidays extremely well. I explained that it’s entirely natural for us to get overwhelmed, exhausted, and just run out of the energy needed to self-regulate.
In particular, I told him, it’s completely natural for children to have big feelings over the holidays. There’s a huge build-up of excitement and anticipation as we near Christmas, and then suddenly it’s all done. For some, it can feel like a huge let-down when the gift-giving and partying are over.
That’s when he caught my?mistake
I totally got called out. I told my son it was entirely natural for kids to become overwhelmed and emotional during the holidays, and it’s not necessarily their fault because their brains are still learning ways to manage all of the big feelings that come along with this time of year.
His question for me was,
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“If it’s not my fault, then why do I get consequences for it?”
Well, I’ll be damned.
How do I answer that one? Understandably, he ran out of the emotional energy to regulate his emotions, and had a bit of a difficult period. I also ran out of the emotional energy to self-regulate, and when he said some things I didn’t like, I sent him to his room as a consequence.
I explained that, while emotions are completely natural, and it can be very difficult to manage all of them, we do still need to acknowledge when our behaviours or words may have hurt others. Later we may need to make amends if we said or did something we regret.
(Well, mom, that’s your cue).
It was my responsibility to role-model what accepting responsibility looks like, and to set the example for him. That means adults should be the first to apologize when an adult and child have had a conflict, or have both handled a situation in a less than desirable way.
When children’s emotions are too big for them to manage independently, they need us to provide calm support, to co-regulate with them. Joining them in becoming dysregulated (however understandable and human a response) only serves to escalate the situation.
I apologized for raising my voice and sending him to his room, instead of encouraging everyone to take a moment in a non-punitive way. Once we talked things out, and he no longer had to save face, he was also able to apologize and we could move on with our evening.
Plan ahead
In the heat of the moment we are not the best decision-makers. Just as children’s PFCs are not yet fully developed, our PFCs are also less effective when we are under stress or experiencing intense emotions.
This is why it’s best to have a general plan in place for how you will handle it if a loved one starts to lose their ability to self-regulate. The less you have to rely on your PFC in the moment, and the better prepared you are for this inevitability, the more effectively you will be able to support them.
Likewise, if you have a plan in place for when you start to feel dysregulated, the more likely you are to engage in self-calming strategies, and the less likely you are to behave impulsively.
Wishing everyone peaceful new year’s celebrations, and all the best in 2023!
? Jillian Enright, Neurodiversity MB
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References
Andrewes, D.G., Jenkins, L.M. (2019). The Role of the Amygdala and the Ventromedial Prefrontal Cortex in Emotional Regulation: Implications for Post-traumatic Stress Disorder. Neuropsychological Review 29, 220–243. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11065-019-09398-4
Casey, B.J., & Jones, R.M. (2010). Neurobiology of the adolescent brain and behavior: implications for substance use disorders. Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, 49(12), 1189–201. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jaac.2010.08.017
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