Managing the Post-Holiday "Why Are My Kids Acting Like This?" Slump

This holiday season is kind of a shitshow. Given what kids need and how their brains work, their difficult behavior isn't their (or your) fault.

Welcome to Is My Kid the Asshole?, a newsletter from science journalist, professional speaker and author Melinda Wenner Moyer, which you can read more about here. If you like it, please subscribe and/or share this post with someone else who would too.

In last week’s newsletter, I said I wouldn’t be posting a newsletter this week, because I’m on vacation in Florida, visiting my parents. Well, I decided to send a newsletter anyway — because my kids are not particularly easy right now, and I imagine the same is true of many of yours, and I want to share some thoughts and tips.

As parents, we do so much for kids over the holidays. We buy them gifts, make them delicious food, take them to see their relatives (or host their relatives when they visit us). It feels like we’re giving and giving and giving, and yet kids sometimes respond by taking and taking and taking (and then demanding more, and complaining if everything’s not exactly to their liking, and then throwing epic meltdowns).

This year, our parental stress levels are stretched to the max thanks to Omicron — so we have the added responsibility of somehow acting as if things are OK when, in fact, for many of us, they really are not. We have to overcompensate for our fears and frustrations in order to make things seem merry and bright. It’s unfair and it’s exhausting. And especially when, despite all our sacrifices and hard work, our kids are still acting like terrors.

If this is the case — and your kids have been challenging this week — know that this is OK. It’s not because you’ve been doing anything wrong or spoiling your kids, it’s not something you have to “fix,” and most importantly, you’re not alone. Kids pick up on our stress, and even without a pandemic thrown into the mix, holiday seasons are actually very difficult for children. Kids thrive on routine and normalcy, and the holidays are a time when their routines are upended. Plus, their brains are very different from ours; the part that’s responsible for impulse control and rational thinking isn’t fully developed until age 25, so they simply lack the capability to manage expectations and respond “appropriately” to many things. So, as you struggle as a parent this week, I just want you to keep this in mind:

THE HOLIDAYS ARE WHEN KIDS ACT OUT THE MOST, AND IT ISN’T YOUR FAULT.

But…. what can we do to make our lives easier? I have a few tips, which I’ve culled from past newsletters and articles. I hope this is helpful. Hang in there.

1. Try to weave routine and structure into your kids’ days.

A few years ago, I talked with UCLA clinical psychologist Catherine Mogil about holiday kid anxiety for a piece I wrote for Slate. “This time of year, all of the things we put in place that help children feel safe and secure and know what to expect go out the window,” she said. Over holiday breaks, we tend to eliminate structure and leave our days open and free. This freedom, which can feel wonderful to us, isn’t so easy for our kids to wrap their heads around.

Indeed, there’s a growing body of research supporting the idea that kids thrive on routine and structure and suffer without it. In a 2018 study, for instance, researchers asked families with preschoolers how frequently they followed certain routines, like eating meals at a particular time, having clean-up schedules, and having set bedtimes. They found that the more the families followed these kinds of routines, the closer the relationships were between parents and their children, the less parent-child conflict they experienced, and the more self-control their kids exhibited. Other research has shown that kids become less anxious and depressed in the face of challenges when their families follow routines.

So when routines disappear over the holidays, kids feel less safe and secure — and what happens? They become more challenging. They need more and they react more. They feel like they don’t know what’s coming and when, and that makes them irritable and anxious. “Anytime something changes in their environment, we often see an explosion of behavioral stuff. That's really just them expressing their stress from that transition,” said Tina Payne Bryson when I interviewed her last year for my newsletter.

One thing we can do to make the holidays easier, then, is to incorporate routine and structure into each day. I know, I know; isn’t the whole point of the holidays that we lounge on the couch sipping eggnog? Yes, well, welcome to parenting. You don’t have to schedule every second, but maybe you could have breakfast at the same time each day (even if it’s later than normal), or read a book together right before lunch every morning. With older kids, perhaps you designate certain windows of the day for screen use or phone calls with friends, and those times stay relatively constant. (Need ideas for daily routines? The CDC has a section on its website that includes detailed recommended daily schedules for families with kids of different ages.)

Another smart idea is to talk to your kids each morning about what their day will look like. Perhaps at breakfast you say, OK, it’s a beautiful day so let’s all go on a walk. Then after that we can have lunch and watch a movie. You can do this even if you don’t really have plans, just to help your kids manage their expectations and know what’s coming. Today, it’s so cold and yucky out, shall we just sit by the fire and do puzzles?

Consider, too, that many of the ways in which we relax over the holidays involve indulgences. We let kids stay up late. We let them eat more sweets before bedtime. In essence, we tell them that we are relaxing our boundaries and our rules for them, and this can be confusing when we suddenly decide to uphold other rules. If we’ve let our kids stay up late and decorate cookies, it may then be baffling when we suddenly get mad at them for decorating the dog with frosting too. Your kid might think, you let me do all this other stuff; why isn’t icing the puppy also OK?! So while it’s fine to relax our rules a bit over the holidays, don’t go overboard. Maintain some structure in order to maintain your sanity.

2. Don’t get caught up in the minutiae of your kids’ feelings or try to rescue them from their frustration, anger or sadness.

If your kid loses her mind because, say, her favorite pajamas are dirty, don’t focus too much on the PJs; you don’t have to do a load of wash immediately to solve the problem. Chances are, the pajamas were just an excuse for your kid let out big feelings that had been harboring about other things. Just let her cry — she probably needs it.

For a story I wrote for The New York Times last summer, I interviewed child psychologists and psychiatrists about the best ways to handle kids’ negative emotions. We often feel like it’s our job to rescue our children from them, but actually, the best thing is to give them the space to have and hold those feelings. “The way you help a kid is by managing the sad feelings, not by denying them, not by distracting them,” said Madeline Levine, a psychologist based in San Francisco and the author of Ready or Not: Preparing Our Kids to Thrive in an Uncertain and Rapidly Changing World, when I interviewed her for my article.

Essentially, Levine explained, you want to let your kids know their feelings are normal and OK, and that you’re there for them. If they want to talk, you’re there to listen; if they don’t, that’s OK too. If you’re not sure how to broach the topic, you can even talk about your own feelings. If you’re sad that Christmas or Hanukkah is over, or that you had to cancel your plans to visit family, you can share that — let them know you’re a little sad, too, because that lets your child know he’s not alone and that you won’t be mad if he shares his feelings with you.

Keep in mind, too, that kids may communicate their unhappy feelings in unexpected ways. Maybe your children aren’t moping around, but instead are picking fights with their siblings or breaking house rules. Or perhaps they’re regressing — they’re behaving in ways that remind you of how they behaved, say, two years ago. Regression often happens when kids feel unsettled or anxious and want more attention from their parents; to address it, give kids a little extra reassurance and love, which can provide the security they crave. (For more on regression, why it happens and what to do about it, read this other New York Times piece I wrote in 2020.)

2. Communicate expectations to your kids in advance.

Let’s say you’ve dressed your child up to celebrate New Year’s Eve with your extended family. There’s your adorable 6-year-old, dressed to the nines in his holiday blazer. Surely he knows that he should be polite and behave himself. You arrive at the gathering and he disappears to play with the other kids. Then, two hours later, you watch in horror as he tears through the dining room, shirtless and screaming, and steals the entire plate of brownies.

In that moment, your kid looks like a monster. But I assure you, he’s not. Let’s rewind: You’ve just thrown your child, who doesn’t have a ton of social skills or a well-developed frontal lobe, into a new and awkward situation. Chances are, you also didn’t explain your expectations clearly in advance. And even if you did, well, are you sure that they were age-appropriate? (See, for instance, this newsletter I wrote about why kids have such terrible table manners.) “They're in a jacket that's itchy and annoying, they're with people they don't really know or maybe don't feel that comfortable with — it's not a recipe for success,” said child and teen development specialist Robyn Silverman when I interviewed her for my newsletter last year. Yet paradoxically, “we typically expect the most of them in those times.”

So if you’re going to an event or visiting family and you have specific expectations for your children, first consider whether they’re really age-appropriate, and then explain them to your kids in advance. You can even practice by role-playing and going over exactly how you hope they behave and why it’s important to you.

Say it again with me: Your kids’ behavior this week is not a reflection on you, and you should not feel responsible for it or guilty about it. Special occasions and breaks in routine are hard for kids, and this is especially true in the midst of a pandemic, when children can pick up on the stress of the world and aren’t sure how to process it.

Thank you all for supporting my work this year. I launched this newsletter just over a year ago, and it’s grown so much. I’m beyond thrilled!! It’s been so wonderful getting to know many of you in my subscriber threads, and I appreciate all the comments and questions. Keep them coming! Happy Holidays!