Children can experience stress during holidays
Children of divorced parents often find the holiday season stressful and confusing.
Memories of familiar routines fill their hearts and minds. Perhaps they don’t want to forego the trip to grandma’s house for the family dinner. Or they may want to continue to open their gifts in their own home-the way to used to be. They often experience frustration, fear, anger, guilt, sadness and even dread.
Teens especially may experience increased turmoil as their ambivalence toward authority figures-including their parents-intensifies and results in conflicting demands. If their parents have remarried, it often means adjustments from old traditions to new ones in the blended family. Adjusting to change often creates inner hostilities and the tendency to blame parents for changing “everything I liked to do.”
Smaller children, needing the love and security of both parents, are often caught in the middle of an ongoing war between their parents. Instead of experiencing the joy and anticipation of the holidays, they develop feelings of instability and insecurity.
Here are other examples of stress that children of divorce may encounter:
• Parents may intensify battles over finances, as expenses for gifts, travel and entertainment occur. Children may feel the war over money is their fault. One teen-ager told me “I wish my parents would just forget about me during the holidays and fight over something else.”
• Issues of power and control often come to the forefront. Each parent wants to know in detail what the other parent will be doing with the child and will often seize upon this opportunity to criticize the former spouse. Children often feel guilt, wondering if they are the cause of it all.
• Adjusting to new routines, new traditions and new expectations in a blended family can make children feel awkward and out of place, especially if the child is asked to relate intimately to people coming from a different family with dissimilar backgrounds.
Of course, not all children of divorced and children of blended families have these feelings. Many parents have been careful to consider their children’s needs and have cooperated to make the transition work. Here are some methods parents can use to help reduce the stress.
• Make a dedicated attempt to keep the season from being a battleground where the children become casualties. Develop and maintain an awareness of the effects unresolved negative feelings and emotions can have on kids.
• Give children the time and opportunity to discuss their feelings and emotions. Ask them what they would like to continue or discontinue about holiday arrangements. Involve grandparents and other family members to help promote a sense of continuity and tradition.
• Avoid questioning the child about what happened in the other parent’s household.
• Send and receive the child to and from the other parent with feelings of love, trust and assurance that both parents are a haven of security.
Harold H. LeCrone, Jr., Ph.D. Copyright 2001
