Managing Children’s Stress & Anxiety During the Holidays

Rachel Degen on December 13, 2024

Written by Doug Aupperle, Licensed Psychologist & Health Service Provider in Psychology

Doug Aupperle, Mind & Spirit Counseling CenterThe holidays can be filled with joy, wonder, fun, and excitement, but for some children, it can also bring stress and anxiety with changes in routines, high expectations, decreased sleep and healthy eating, and sensory overload. Some signs that children may be struggling include:

  • increased irritability or tantrums
  • increased clinginess
  • homesickness (if away from home)
  • isolating themselves or spending more time alone during gatherings, and/or frequently asking to go home
  • reduced excitement about and pleasure in things they usually enjoy

However, there are things parents and caregivers can do to help buffer against these adverse impacts for children. Kate Paradis of Boston Children’s Hospital and Brenna Drury of Alexander Youth Network offer these helpful tips:

  1. Maintain Routines as Much as Possible:

Most children thrive on and find security in routines, and disruption of those can lead to increased anxiety and stress. Try to still follow regular meal times, bedtime routines, and daily rituals. Consistency helps children feel more secure and less anxious during the holidays.

  1. Keep Open Communication About Changes:

Of course, some changes in schedules and plans are unavoidable during the holidays. When changes do occur, try to give children advance notice and talk about them openly and in specific detail. Invite children to express their feelings and concerns about those changes, and offer empathy regarding those feelings, too. Being heard helps them to feel affirmed and begins to diffuse their anxiety. If the child continues to feel uncomfortable or anxious about new or different plans and activities, don’t force them to participate, as this will only likely escalate emotions and behaviors.  Instead, give them space and time to manage their emotions from the sidelines and then re-engage when and to the degree they are ready and able to tolerate.

  1. Manage Expectations:

The holidays inevitably come with expectations, and it is important to help children manage them realistically. Discuss creating realistic expectations, and emphasize the more important and positive values of the holidays, too.  Examples include focusing on the holiday spirit of giving, as well as the value of sharing time together, rather than just focusing on the material side of the holidays.  Encouraging volunteering and service during the holidays also reinforces values of generosity and community engagement. There is also evidence that engaging in service to others also helps to improve mood, anxiety levels, and a general sense of well-being for those serving and helping others.

  1. Establish Safe/Quiet Spaces:

The holidays often bring a flurry (or blizzard) of activities and social gatherings, which can be overstimulating and overwhelming for some children. Create a designated safe, quiet location with soothing, comforting materials available where children can take a break when feeling stress and/or sensory overload. This might be a quiet room or corner of a room explicitly designated for this purpose. Bundling up and spending some quiet time on walks in nature helps with re-grounding and reducing stress and anxiety, too. In fact, just a little exposure to cold air is also grounding in and of itself.

  1. Maintain Balanced & Healthy Eating:

The increased abundance of sweet and calorie-rich food can become a major focus during the holidays. As a result, it can be easy and tempting for children and families to fall away from their healthier eating habits, but what you eat does truly affect how you feel. Be mindful of what your family is eating. If possible, bring along healthy snacks when running holiday errands and traveling. Limit the sweets and rich foods as special treats when you’re at social gatherings and special events, and moderate how much they are consumed on these occasions, too.

  1. Foster Self-Care:

Parents and caregivers are also not immune to stress during the holidays, so how well they tend to their own self-care to help manage that in turn affects how well they can support their children coping. It also allows them to model and demonstrate self-care and adaptive coping for their children to follow. Examples of basic self-care include physical activity, healthy eating, mindfulness activities, getting adequate sleep and rest, and taking breaks.

When you can’t do it alone

Terri Speirs on April 17, 2017

Carol Bodensteiner is an award winning author, and a member of the 2017 Women Helping Women committee.

Special to The Des Moines Pastoral Counseling Center

By Carol Bodensteiner

If you’re at all like me, you feel you should be able to handle what life throws your way. Sure we know we’re going to hit bumps in the road, but even when we go down, we pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, as the song goes, and start all over again.

My sense of how to handle life comes from my German and English heritage. From my mother’s side, I inherited the well known English traits of ‘stiff upper lip,’ and ‘keep calm and carry on.’ From my father’s side, I acquired the German ability to work hard and solve my own problems.

These traits served me well throughout my life. Successful career. Raising a son. Marriage – divorce – marriage. No challenge I couldn’t tackle. If I just put my head down and kept moving forward, all would be fine.

Until it wasn’t.

When my mother died in August 2007, it was a shock because she was healthy. Even though Mom was 91, her death seemed in the order of things. But when my sister died by suicide less than nine months later, I was knocked off balance. Within the following 18 months, two close cousins and my mother’s sister also passed away. Then my husband and I hit a rough spot in our marriage.

The magnitude of such significant losses in such a short time, as well as the threat to my marriage, shook the earth I stood on. Who was I without those people who raised and shaped me? How would I manage if my second marriage crumbled? I questioned everything and everyone, from my church, to the values I was raised with, to who I was and who I wanted to be.

Believe it or not, I thought I could still manage on my own. One foot in front of the other. Keep moving ahead. After all, what else can you do?

Except I wasn’t okay. When my husband lost his footing on a ladder and wound up in the emergency room with a broken ankle, I realized I was done. Life was ‘piling on,’ and I couldn’t take it anymore.

In a rare moment of open sharing, I unloaded my anxiety on a friend. She recommended the Des Moines Pastoral Counseling Center. Even though I’d known about the Center for years, counseling is never my first thought. It’s not the way I was raised.

Yet I had nothing left and I knew it. I made an appointment. Then another and another.

Soft spoken and caring, my counselor helped me walk through the present-day trials, even as she teased out relevant factors from my childhood, my relationship with my parents, and my first marriage that contributed to the pit I found myself in.

As a writer, I process things by writing about them. I approached the counseling sessions the same way. Notebook on my lap, pen in hand, I recorded thoughts and words to consider later.

It is difficult to hear, to think, to talk, to write when you’re crying, which is what I did throughout most sessions. I needed to let it all go, and my counselor let me. Without judgment. Mostly she asked questions, forcing me to examine my own self. Periodically she suggested ways to think about a point and possible ways to move forward.

Above all, she gave me an unbiased, non-judgmental perspective, which I desperately needed. Over time I arrived in a better place.

I am grateful to the Des Moines Pastoral Counseling Center for offering a safe haven with talented counselors to help me and others through the rough spots, those times when even the most independent of us, in spite of our training and will, can’t go it alone.

Carol Bodensteiner is a writer who finds inspiration in the places, people, culture and history of the Midwest. After a successful career in public relations consulting, she turned to creative writing. She blogs about writing, her prairie, gardening, and whatever in life interests her at the moment. She published a memoir Growing Up Country: Memories of an Iowa Farm Girl in 2008. She indie published her debut novel Go Away Home in 2014. Go Away Home was acquired by Lake Union Publishing, an imprint of Amazon Publishing and re-launched in 2015.

 

They told me I wasn’t alone – Elizabeth’s story

Terri Speirs on July 12, 2016

Elizabeth images

Depression does not make a distinction of rich or poor, man, woman or child, yet it can have the same tragic outcome: suicide. However depression is treatable and people can experience the fullness of life. As an example, we offer the story of one of our clients, Elizabeth. (Shared with permission. We’ve changed the name and identifying details to protect privacy.)

If you saw Elizabeth today, you would see a beaming mother of two little boys, embracing the joy and challenges of a growing family along with her husband. But it wasn’t always that way. Life was bleak for Elizabeth.

Elizabeth has suffered anxiety and depression since she was a young girl, starting therapy in third grade. Her fears were so dark she didn’t know if she would succeed in school, enter the workforce or continue to live. Psychiatric medication helped curb her mental anguish yet after she married she faced an impossible choice: having children or maintaining health. Elizabeth imagined her life with prescription medication would hurt the baby, and her life without meds might end.

Elizabeth came to the Center during this time of grave discernment. She met with a licensed counselor and the Center’s psychiatry physician assistant (PA). They all worked together to create a treatment plan. Elizabeth learned that there are safe medication options, if she and her husband decided to start a family. They did, and Elizabeth’s clinical team walked with them every step of the way.

The children are now one and three years old. Elizabeth is a working mother and tends to her self-care. Elizabeth continues treatment with her psychiatry PA and speaks fondly of her: “She tells me ‘happy, healthy mommy means happy, healthy baby.’”

Elizabeth is one of more than 4,000 individuals assisted annually at the Center. Approximately 35 percent of our clinical clients utilize a sliding pay scale, thanks to generous donations.

“They told me I wasn’t alone,” said Elizabeth about her clinical team. “They said I wasn’t the only one who experiences this.”