Holiday heaven, holiday hell.
So it’s September, and all are safely gathered in – back to school. Back to work. Back to the term-time regime.
So how’s it been?
As a former teacher and someone whose work is still subject to the booms and busts of term-time , Summer is a time I look forward to tremendously. For me, it’s a much more relaxed and fluid pace – which I enjoy. Time in the mornings for work, more reading, research, writing and less performance…Time in the afternoon to hang out with our teenage daughter, to care for the garden, to prepare fresh, zesty salads. Time to read, time to mooch around the shops, time to catch up with friends…
Long evenings in the sunshine, outdoor living, barbecues, sunsets, easy-going mornings, coffee with pastries…and time to savour the last crumbs…
And then we wake up and get real…It’s true I do love Summer – but among its joys there are anxieties. It’s by no means as spacious as in my dreamlife! We invest our holiday time with so many hopes, dreams, and ideals – that invariably things fall short.
I always imagine the heaps of books I will read, the podcasts I’ll listen to, the writing I’ll do. By the time we get half way through what seemed like an endless vista of possibilities, I’m an anxious hurricane of activity and self-chastisement, clutching at the straws of time and projecting catch-up guilt onto the screen-time of our daughter…
I’m facing a reality whereby I’m so revved up, I even performance manage my leisure time…
I have learned also, from my coaching work, not to assume that Summer is great for every parent, every child, every family. Holidays can be divided, divisive, and fractious. Not only might a child not have asked to be born, they certainly might not want the holiday you booked and yearned for. And they won’t hold back in showing it.
Power struggles around family leisure time are by no means the sole preserve of a moody teenager. Children of all ages can make their non-compliance felt most strongly and persistently around their preferences and changes of routine. Or around the curtailment of their autonomy – being in their room, surrounded by their stuff, and with their friends. Marinading the weapons-grade WiFi that supports their every streaming / gaming need.
And no. There’s no way of positively reframing the idea that the absence of a dishwasher in a holiday home might be either fun or mindful. There’s no silver-lining such first world deficits!
Summer involves several transitions…all of which land in different ways with children as they grow – and can create tension in relationships in family life.
Firstly, there’s the separation from school. From friends, teachers, the security of those routines and certainties. Routine – familiarity and mastery of routine – is one of the ways in which from a young age, children start to build a sense of agency, autonomy, the ability to orient themselves…First I wake up, then I get out of bed, say good morning, have a wash and dress. Next I go downstairs and have breakfast…
Quite often in the life-cycle of the school year, the end of the Summer term will present a noticeably turbulent time in terms of behaviour and relationships, and the emergence of safeguarding concerns. There’s a kind of separation anxiety that forms a part of this dynamic.
Once on holiday, there’s a recalibration – a transition into a new routine – whether that’s going on holiday immediately, or starting at a summer-school or activity camp, or whether it’s having a lot more down-time either with parents or carers, or more independently.
An easy way of filling the gulf left by school and term time activity is via the screen and specifically via addictive passive consumption or gaming uses of the screen…which is all well and good until it isn’t…and the explosion backlash to limit-setting adds extra spice.
There’s a shift that comes when it’s a whole family experience and parents are also on holiday – and suddenly we’re wall-to-wall in each other’s faces…which can be as much of a delight as it may sometimes be a strain. For us, the time off is more scarce and therefore incredibly precious. For them, they are already pre-loaded with down-time experience – good, bad, entitled, and ugly…
For Teens on holiday…
Suddenly their personal habits, views, preferences, motivation, or lack of, their essence, is under the parent microscope in a way that can be most unwelcome. For them, getting back home, getting some space, getting away, getting you back to work and off their backs – even getting back to school might be preferable!
And of course, they have the digital umbilical to their friendships – so they can be ‘here-not-here’ on holiday…maintaining their 94 day snap-streak with X, their 230 day snap-streak with Y…and doomscrolling pinterest. It’s exhausting. And the gap in connection is all too noticeable.
Young Adults on holiday with parents…
Maybe you were on holiday with a young adult – post sixth form / university age – and got a closer glimpse than you wanted of what normally might be happening off-stage from family life – hook-up holiday romances, or partying just a little too hard, outrageous inertia following hangovers…and lo – they are revealed as an entitled passenger riding low on your hard-earned wings…
Holidaying with children / young children…
Younger children, they may be basking in the full beam of connection with one or both parents and soaking you up! Their connection battery is topped up to the full, whilst your energy battery can get quite depleted…Especially if you’re (over)compensating for the parental guilt of a time-poor working parent.
And it’s lovely…but you need a holiday from your holiday!
For them the end of the holiday is the end of that ultra-connectedness, and a point of resistance to the separation.
Transferring back to childcare that does not involve you may be resented and acted out on. Not easy to be the family member, carer, child-minder, nanny on the receiving end of that – and terrifying for the parent whose whole career house of card depends on the stability of that relationship.
And that’s before we even get to handling transitions in and out of routines where neurodiversity is at play.
Some context – real families in real life vary!
By the age of 15 in the UK at least 50% of children can expect to have parents who have separated. So this is by no means a minority! There’s the passing of the baton of the child spending ‘quality holiday time’ with each parent. Underlining the separation, and ramping up the demand to handle transition and settle to the different routines of separate parents…
Beyond that is the way in which there are the realities of re-formed and re-forming families. Dad’s second younger wife and their infants have gone all whole-food, organic and Birkenstock when all they want is KFC, vats of cola, and Snapchat / FIFA / Fortnite / fill in the blanks…
Mum’s new man might be trying way too hard and it’s just not going to work / is so embarrassing…and so the holiday proceeds under the cloud of the side-eye and eyeroll of tween/teen (pre)judgement…
And for the parent who is back at home with their solitude and freedom can be treated to the silent treatment or well designed complaints that spike just the right amount of worry to spice things up…
When it happens, there’s no escaping holiday hell…
So yeah, I guess Summer can be tough and can be incredibly confronting and disappointing. It makes it extra hard when it’s supposed to be this sunny and cool Shangri-La of family time…
Holiday hell – it’s isolating
As Tolstoy famously quipped in creating what’s now known as the Anna Karenina principle:
All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
Many a parent comes back to work to questions about their holiday that are simply unanswerable. How was Florida / Disneyland? How was Provence? How was Rome?
I could tell you…how much money it’s costing…how much doubt I’m feeling about raising selfish / spoiled / materialistic / entitled / ungrateful kids…but I don’t want to say it, and you don’t want to hear it!
I’d hazard a guess that most families, most parents, have had some sort of disastrous holiday of some kind or other – but it’s not for public consumption…not for insta or for the watercooler. It’s for firm friends only and then after a few goldfish bowls of gin-and-tonic…
Isolating. Unpleasant. Vulnerable. Revealing.
But not necessarily YOUR FAULT – though it may feel like it!
Sense-checking our family stories, and writing better new ones…
What happened on holiday – does it stay on holiday? What meanings do we make of it? How does it shape our stories as a family – of who we are, what sort of people we are, what sort of family we are, what sort of parents we are?
Taking stock of things, and detoxing some of those narratives and taking meanings from the dynamics with a sense of compassion, common humanity, and warmth (Dr Kristen Neff – Self Compassion research) – can be pivotal in activating a more hopeful story for the writing of future holiday chapters…
It’s like those episodes of Friends ‘The one where Rachel / Mom quits’…
How can we turn the story of that holiday into an amusing episode where – gah – we were human! Turns into a catalyst for some thinking out of the feelings…some learning, some collaboration, some creativity, some growth…?
That’s the antidote to the internalised sense of shame and failure, and the withdrawal into playing smaller in our expectations and dreams of what family time might become…
Some questions that might help – Learning from the discomfort…
NB. If your experience was holiday heaven rather than holiday hell…you can still use these following reflections – but flip them to embed and grow the good.
Something that we often take for granted when things go well – and contribute to a ‘hedonic treadmill’ effect…our big, agile, worry brains are wired to keep us safe rather than keep us happy, so we’re good at spotting and amplifying discontents…
- What were your feelings about the ending of your holiday? Regret, remorse, relief? Satisfaction? Gratitude? Whatever they are, hold that feeling and be curious about it – rather than judgmental.
- What do those feelings – the intensity of them, their resonance – tell you about the extent to which your needs were met in the holiday experience you had?
- What stories do you notice you are telling yourself about the key protagonists involved? And about yourself?
- What might the future impact of these stories be on your relationships, on family dynamics if they just continue to run as they are? How might this impact on how you think, feel, plan, and approach future time in connection with family…those higher pressure, so-called apex events in family life?
- Write the headlines of these stories down on paper without editing…Review them through the classic filters from Buddhism through to Socrates, Meltzer and Byron Katie’s The Work…are they TRUE? Are they KIND? Are they NECESSARY? Are they HELPFUL? You can use scaling from 1-4 to give an indication…
- What’s the voice in your head like that is telling you those messages? A critical parent? A disappointed role model? A sniping inner critic? A busy belittler?
- What were the hopes you had for this holiday that were disappointed? What actually are the values that underpin those hopes? And how important to you are those hopes – why do they matter?
- Once you have sat with and allowed these feelings, stories, beliefs, and values to be, and be seen…Look at what you felt is necessary to take on board as a result of your experiences and the values that underpin them.
- Remember – the behaviour you witnessed, and perhaps even the behaviour you participated in – is something that may be helpfully reframed with curiosity to get something more insightful and interesting to emerge. Or at least something less persecutory… “All behaviour is a communication…a skill not yet learned, or a need not yet met.” Marshall Rosenberg…What are the skills, what are the needs? And how can we go about fruitfully addressing these with out loved ones?
- Create a plan of action and take action once you’ve released the feelings more successfully. You don’t want to try to make repair if you’re like a pressure-cooker waiting to blow. Writing yourself – or one or more of the key protagonists a ‘no-send’ letter might be helpful to shift the surface feelings like anger and irritation, and help you also see some of the harder, more vulnerable feelings that lie beneath like sadness, loss, fear.
- Run through the choices you have for action, based on this reflective unpacking…always remember – taking effective ACTION BINDS ANXIETY (Clinical Psychologist and author Dr Rick Hanson). This may include the following:
- Ensuring you can approach this with clean communication – not critical, perhaps considering Marshall Rosemberg’s Non-Violent Communication model – sound out your partner – fellow parent / caregiver.
- Addressing your concerns and specific complaints cleanly with key protagonists in your family.
- Widening the pool of information and understanding you have about perceptions, beliefs, values – what might be important / unimportant about family time.
- Work out as parent(s) where your bottom lines are when it comes to ‘must-have’s’ of family holidays.
- Looking together at what might work better next time – co-create ideas about how expectations, meanings, dreams of holiday time and time set-aside for family connection can work better and go further in meeting people’s needs and upholding your core values….
I hope this helps. If you’re interested in doing this work, and might want to do this with my help as a coach or in a one-off consultation to launch you on the way…get in touch…
contact@emmagleadhill.com
