August 2024 | How to Help Yourself (and Your Child) Through Those Tough Summer Days
July 31, 2024
We may not be able to prepare the future for our children, but we can at least prepare our children for the future. - President Franklin D. Roosevelt
During the summer months, the challenges of parenthood change as children look forward to less structure and more freedom. However, the adult work schedule remains the same, with the additional expectations of entertaining children during heat waves and making vacation plans. These changes might feel unwelcome to parents, and they also bring opportunities. While adjustments such as leaving a familiar routine, separating from friends, encountering new peers, and working with different authority figures can be overwhelming for children, they also bring heightened need for parents to manage and express their emotions - in other words, to develop skills that are helpful for parenting during the school year too!
How to best manage our emotions as parents as these adjustments take place? Cause and effect are important factors to consider when managing our emotions. We might respond to the uncertainty of the summer schedule (cause) with frustration (effect). We might react in the literal heat of the moment with heat – instead of calmly expressing our feelings, positive and negative, and thereby creating space between those feelings and our reactions towards our children, each other and to the moment at hand.
What can we do, as parents, to share our experiences and provide a model for how children can talk about their emotions? When we manage our triggered thoughts and feelings with better understanding and less reactivity, we can help our children with awareness as well. We can help them recognize the sequence of events (what happened and how we respond to what happened) and how to respond when reacting to them. For example: we might feel frustrated when our child is fearful to try something new. How we express our frustration can have an impact on how our child handles their fear. How we react and express any of our emotions can reinforce our child’s thoughts, feelings, and actions.
Let’s take a common summer-time scenario: imagine being asked to transport our child to camp or summer employment, which starts later in the morning than school. This change of plan makes you wonder if you will be on time for work. In addition, our child has some resistance to getting ready and is taking longer than usual to get ready. You might want to help our child get ready to make sure both they and you are on time. You might let our child stay home because of how uncomfortable they feel. You might criticize our child for moving slowly or show your stress about being late by yelling. These parental responses only reinforce our child’s behavior. Instead, ask yourself:
What were the antecedents to our emotions?
What behaviors did we choose to show (or hide) our emotions?
What were the consequences of our actions?
Only then can we begin to wonder about what caused our child to feel uncomfortable, how our child showed or hid their emotions, and what happened in response. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy provides parents with the tools to respond to the unexpected not by accommodating for our child to avoid uncomfortable experiences, but by reinforcing positive behaviors and acknowledging the potential for future uncertainties by modeling the calm expression of emotions. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy also prepares our children for a future filled with uncertainty, positive and negative, by modeling and teaching them how to express their emotions and understand the role of cause and effect on their reactions.