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Summer break is just around the corner for families of school-aged children – whether you are ready or not. You may already be planning your annual vacation, buying pool passes, and buying tickets online for local venues to enjoy together as a family. However, you may also dread your child’s hours of unscheduled time. It’s understandable – transitioning from your predictable, regimented school-year routine to a less structured summer routine can shock your kids’ systems. How do you plan to survive the summer with your kids impacted by trauma?
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Welcome to this week's Week in Wisdom by Creating a Family. Creating a Family is a national support and training nonprofit for foster, adoptive,
and kinship families. Week in Wisdom is where we're answering your questions. Each week, we take one question and we answer it in about five or so minutes. You can send your questions to info @creatingafamily org.
All right, this week I'm not really answering a question so much as I'm sharing something. By this point you are well into the summer and some of you might be pulling your hair out.
Been there, done that. All right, so get it. So today I thought I would share five tips for surviving the summer with kids impacted by trauma.
Consider it my gift to you for the summer. The first tip is in your head acknowledge that change is hard and in particular if our kids have had traumatic beginnings or have had prenatal substance exposure,
alcohol, drugs or whatever, change is especially hard. Just because you are excited about the summer or just even because the children or the child is excited about the summer does not mean that it is not a disruption and a transition,
and that can be hard. And transitions are really hard for a lot of kids in general, regardless of trauma. One thing that can help, it may be a little too late to do this on the front end, but you can certainly do this at the end of summer,
and that is create ending and beginning rituals, ceremonies, or whatever. It doesn't have to be fancy. It's just something that you do as a family that kind of marks the ending of one time,
in this case, the school year, and the beginning of another time. And it could be anything. It could be going to the pool for the whole day with a picnic that you do every year,
or at least this year, to kind of welcome in the summer. And you can do on the other end, come up with something that you can do that can help delineate the ending of summer and the beginning of the new school year.
The third tip is to build a buffer into these transition times. It may be a day or two and I realize vacation time for the parents may dictate whether that's possible.
If you have enough vacation time or a stay -in -home parent to be able to take just a day off where there's not any scheduled activities you just relish the nothingness that summer can often bring are the lack of at least the school routine.
I think it's important to do, if you can, and if you don't have a day to give, then this goes back to the traditions or the rituals that we set up. Maybe do it for a weekend after school,
and you do something on that weekend that somehow just gives you a break between the ending of school and the beginning of summer, or if we're looking at the end of the summer break to do it the same way where an end of the summer break before the beginning of the new year.
The fourth tip I would give you is to make certain that there is some routine and schedule to your summer. You probably know this by now, but if you don't, all kids,
but especially kids who have had any amount of trauma at all, thrive on routines. And that means you really need to set up some and they should be different just so that you can enjoy the differentness that is summer and the fact that it stays light longer and that the weather is usually nice to be out in the evening.
If you're a stay -at -home parent then you can set aside days of the week in between whether there's you know there's a soccer camp but then then there's vacation Bible school but we have two weeks who are off so On Monday,
we will do library. On Tuesday, we will go to the pool. You get the gist. But working parents can do the very same thing. On Monday night, if the library is open, usually they're open one night,
find out when they have, sometimes they'll have a pajama reading for the kids or whatever, so make one night a library night. And even if they don't have an activity, you can go as a family to the library.
Make one evening a pool evening, make one evening a having dinner outside on a blanket in the backyard and Friday night is going to be movie night or TV show night or whatever it is you do in your family or pizza or something along those ideas so that there is some predictability to the routine.
Now one of the beauties of summer of course is the lack of routine so you want to gauge this you don't want to have it be overly And most of the time, kids are involved in activities as well. They've got swimming lessons,
they've got this, they've got that, or daycare is continuing. But even if daycare is continuing, it's nice to have something different about the summer. So create a routine to honor that.
And your fifth and final tip is to leverage what you already know about your kids. You are the expert on your kids. Even if they're relatively new to your family, you still know them and know them better probably than most other people.
So you know what motivates them, you know what makes them feel safe, you know what their triggers are. So if you're pulling your hair out right about now, breathe deeply and try to figure out what of the things that I have suggested for your tips?
What could be missing here? What triggers could be, could it be that you don't have enough routines going on so your child feels unsafe, kind of untethered. Could it be that your kids are having too much time together?
Or could it be that it's already become too hectic? You've got the kids involved in too many things. Take a look at what you already know and leverage that. Do some sleuthing as to why,
if the summer is not going off to a great start, why that might be. And enjoy as much as you can. Try not just to survive the summer, but thrive this summer,
if at all possible. Thank you for listening to This Week's Week in Wisdom. Before you go, let me tell you about, we have a Facebook support group here at Creating a Family.
It is a very supportive place, a little redundant, but not all support groups on Facebook are supportive and ours is. You can find it at facebook .com /groups /creatingathamily and we would love to have you join.
And if you are enjoying weekend wisdom, please let your friends know and they can subscribe and receive it in their feed at the creating a family .org podcast. So just subscribe there.
And I will see you next week.
