The summer is often a tricky time for families of children with who struggle to manage their emotions. In many cases, they are very anxious and stressed during the school year and struggle accordingly. In the summer, school is out, the expectations on them go down, and their stress and anxiety often drop accordingly.
This frequently leads to a dilemma for parents. They often think this drop in anxiety, and therefore irritability, signals they are ready to end treatment. It is almost always more likely that the child will have more capacity to tolerate small annoyances during the day due to the stress of school being taken away for a couple of months.
In other cases, the family, especially the parents, may feel tired of having to modify their schedule and see the apparent improvement as a rationale for stopping treatment. This obviously makes sense on some levels but at the most basic level is possibly the worst thing you can do to damage long-term success.
It is our opinion at psychdomain.com that you should be really working on building those areas of need for your child during the summer, not letting them sit and fester for another 2-3 months.
Have your vacation and make the most of the summer but there is no reason that you can’t be working with your child at the same time helping them to learn better ways to manage their emotions.
Of course, it often follows that your child learns many of their habits and reactions from watching the people around them. This being the case, the first and most important area you need to be aware of is your own habits and reactions. This idea also leads to one of the biggest reasons many families drop out of treatment, they often expect the brunt of the work will be borne by the child and as they are asked to make some changes themselves they sometimes become frustrated and lose their motivation to continue in treatment.
If, as a family, you feel that change is needed and you are willing to do the necessary work, summer is typically the best time to do it. You can change routines, begin to implement new interventions, and have space to let your child (and yourself) work on new habits without the pressure of school and whatever other after-school activities they would be involved in on a typical day.
Many families stop services during these crucial months when their child may have made some gains in their ability to manage themselves. Those gains often are long forgotten after a summer of video games, Netflix, and social media that allows them to distract themselves from the stressors that may have put them in treatment to begin with.
Summer is the time to visit those stressors to the extent you can, increase time working on them, and continue to move forward with creating new ways of dealing with emotions or problematic situations.
When the school year begins again, then maybe think about cutting back on services, maybe meeting once a week with a therapist or coach for review and practice so that they can continue holding onto the gains they have made over time. There will also typically be people at the school who can help your child on a daily basis with reminders or coaching in the moment.
Schools will be letting out for summer vacation in the next few weeks all over the country. We at psychdomain.com ask you, as a parent, one simple question: where do you want your child to be emotionally when school resumes? Do you want them continuing to move forward with more mature reactions and ability to tolerate stress, or do you want them to have 2-3 months of more ingrained difficulty in dealing with there areas of need?
Stay in touch with psychdomain.com to formulate a plan for working with your child that fits your family’s values and goals.