How Do We Make It Through Summer Without Falling Apart? - Weekend Wisdom

Question:  I feel terrible even saying this, but I am counting down the days until school starts. My kids have trauma histories, ADHD, and prenatal exposure, and summer has been rough. The lack of routine seems to make everything harder—sleep, behavior, arguing, screen time, all of it. We started summer with big plans, but now everyone is cranky, including me. How do we make it through the rest of summer without completely falling apart?

Resources: 

• Embracing Summer: Supporting Children Through Seasonal Transitions
• Empowered to Connect: Summer Survival Resources
• Surviving Summer with Kids Impacted by Trauma
• 5 Tips for Surviving Summer with Kids Impacted by Trauma
• Keeping Your Older Grandkids Busy During the Summer

Transcript

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Tracy Whitney 0:01

Hi, and welcome to Weekend Wisdom. My name is Tracy Whitney. I'm the content director here at Creating a Family. And I'm excited to bring you a real-life practical set of solutions to a question that many, many of us ask over the course of summer break. So our anonymous listener wrote in and said, I feel terrible even saying this, but I am counting down the days until school starts. My kids have trauma histories, ADHD, and prenatal substance exposure. Summer has been rough. The lack of routine seems to make everything harder. Sleep, behaviors, arguing, screen time, all of it. We started the summer with big plans, but now everyone is cranky, including me. How do we make it through the rest of summer without completely falling apart? Well, Anonymous, we feel your pain. We get it. We understand. And we want to say, first, let's just all agree that somewhere around mid-July, summer stops feeling like a fun break and starts feeling like an endurance sport. And if you're listening and nodding your head, you are not alone. So, Anonymous, there's lots of people behind the scenes nodding their head with you right now. Many kids in our community of adoptive, foster, and kinship families do better with structure, predictability, and routine, like the kind that school provides. When summer arrives, even if it's a welcome break from that structure and routine, it can also throw a lot of things off balance for our kids. When our kids are impacted by trauma, prenatal substance exposure, ADHD, autism, or any other neurodevelopmental difference, they often rely on those external supports around them more than sometimes we even realize. So summer can feel harder than you expected. And it doesn't mean that you're doing something wrong. It just means that your child is responding to the big transition from structure, external forces running their day to less of that. The good news is that you don't have to create a Pinterest worthy summer to finish strong. In fact, one of the best things you can do right now is kind of lower the bar for yourself and thus for your children. Maybe delete your Pinterest app for the summer. Don't lower your safety bar or your connection bar, just your expectations bar. If you've been trying to create magical memories every day, give yourself permission to stop. Your child doesn't need a cruise director, they need a steady, consistent, present adult. So as we head into the final stretch of summer, I would suggest that you focus on these three things. First, add back a little bit of structure. Notice I said a little. You don't want to create some big color-coded schedule, and you want to just create some predictable anchors to your day. So a predictable wake-up time, a predictable lunch time, predictable quiet time if they're really little, predictable bedtime. When our kids know what's coming next, their brains don't have to work as hard to follow the rhythms of the day, and therefore don't have to work as hard to stay regulated. Second, you're going to want to protect connection whenever and wherever possible. When behaviors get harder, when their internal state feels less in control and less regulated, then the outside behaviors get harder. Well, that naturally makes us feel like we should be spending more time correcting them. However, the real truth of the matter is that we need to be spending more time connecting with them. To balance that out, try to find one small moment a day where you're just being together. That could be a walk around the neighborhood after dinner. It could be a card game. It could be an ice cream cone on the porch. Could be nighttime swimming. Our kids love nighttime swimming. It could just be sitting on the side of the pool talking about the day. Five minutes of quiet, peaceful presence can go a very long way to balancing out the external behaviors that are reflecting internal chaos. And third would be to ask yourself what actually matters the most to me right now, between now and the first day of school. So maybe it's getting the family's sleep schedules back on track. Maybe it's reducing family stress. Maybe it's slowing down the schedule. Maybe it's helping your child feel successful at a skill that they need to learn or that they want to learn. Just pick one or two of those priorities and let the rest of the other things be good enough. And I recognize that good enough isn't always a worthy goal in our society or in our culture. But if you're trying to survive the summer with kids impacted by trauma, neurodiversity, all of those things, good enough is a good and worthy goal, especially if you're just trying to get through the rest of the summer. Here's the truth of the matter: our goal isn't to win most memorable summer ever, or most outrageously fun summer. Our goal is for everybody to arrive at that first day of school regulated with relationships intact and our sanity mostly preserved. If you're counting down the days till school starts, that's okay. Let yourself off the hook for that. You can love your kids very deeply and still be ready for that school bus to roll up to the driveway. Those two things can absolutely coexist. So take a deep breath, anonymous. Simplify your daily and your weekly schedule where you can. And remember, summer doesn't have to be perfect. You just have to keep showing up. Make this the summer of presence, the summer of connection. If you've made it thus far into the summer, you can do that. If you're even asking these questions, you're probably already doing better than you think you are. So keep in mind that the finish line is in sight. School's not that far away, the rest of the summer will fly by and you can make this happen. So keep going, hang in there, and thank you so much for writing in and asking your question. Listeners, if you find yourself struggling to survive summer or make it through the week, or just come up with creative ideas for keeping your family's routines and structures stable and maintained and healthy, but also interesting enough that you want to keep doing them, you ought to consider joining our Facebook group. We have a large, vibrant online community of adoptive parents, foster parents, birth parents, adoptees, former foster alum, and they all kind of work together and talk together about what's going on in their lives. We share ideas, we share tips, sometimes we share recipes, sometimes we share books that we've read or podcasts that we've listened to that were helpful. And you can find that group at facebook.com slash groups slash creating a family. We would love it if you'd join us over there and enter into the conversations and learn with us about things like surviving summer. Hang in there and please come back and join us next week for another episode of Weekend Wisdom.