and 4 key strategies you can use to help make the season more joyful for everyone!

Change is hard, and this can make the holidays stressful.

The holiday season is a time that’s full of fun, excitement, and joy! And, if you have a neurodivergent, anxious, or highly sensitive child, it might also be a time of stress.

As a parent this can feel really confusing - this is supposed to be such a fun time of year for kids! Why isn’t my child enjoying this? Why do they have such a hard time over the holidays? And what can you do to help?

One thing that is true for many neurodivegent, anxious, and highly sensitive kids is that routine and structure is so helpful. It makes life predictable. It means that kids can manage their expectations and predict what’s coming. It also means fewer big feelings and meltdowns.

Here’s the thing about the joy of the holiday season - it also comes with a loss of all the structure and routine that these kids hold near and dear. School is out. Nights are later. The food we serve and the timing of meals and snacks are likely to be different. Parties also mean new and different sensory and social situations. As adults, we see this as fun! But for your child, it might be quite stressful.

The result: bigger feelings and more meltdowns at the exact time of year that we expect our kids to be having more fun! As a parent, this can be extra hard. You really want them to enjoy the holiday season! So, what can you do?

Let’s talk about 4 helpful tips and strategies to make your holidays more joyful with your neurodivergent, anxious, or highly sensitive child.

A word on stress before we dig in: it’s really helpful to think of ‘stress’ as anything that requires energy to manage/navigate. We often associate stress with negative things, but really positive things require energy, too - like feeling super excited about Santa coming, or an upcoming family gathering. As we move through, keep that in mind: stress = something that uses your child’s energy.

Reduce your child’s holiday stress by using previewing

Help your child to manage these holiday situations better by talking through it with them beforehand. This might sound like:

Here’s what we’ll be doing,
here’s who’s going to be there,
here are some things you can do if you notice you’re starting to get overwhelmed,
here’s what’s expected and unexpected in this place/with these people

This helps your child to ‘gear up’ or anticipate what’s coming, which often really improves coping and can help to decrease feelings of stress or overwhelm.

2. Use co-regulation

Self-regulation is when we manage our own emotions. Co-regulation is when we step in and support someone to manage their thoughts/feelings/behaviours.

Research shows us that co-regulation is often faster than self-regulation in helping kids to feel calmer. We also know that it’s the repeated experience of being co-regulated over and over and over that builds the neural pathways that help us learn to self-regulate in the long term. So not only is it more effective in the short term, it’s also exactly what our kids need to help them in the long term!

Co-regulation is talked about more in the little-kid space, but it’s really for people of all ages (adults included). When our kids are experiencing big feelings, it’s helpful for us to step alongside them and support them back to a regulated place.

We can do this by ‘sharing our calm.’ This might look like:

getting down to their level (or even below their eye level)
using calming tones
a gentle hug (if your child permits)
using very few words. Consider words like: I’m here. You’re safe. It’s okay to feel _____. We’ll work through this together.

When trying to figure out if co-regulation would be helpful, tune into your child’s state. If your child is really dysregulated (this often looks like being really silly, very high energy, or very big feelings), they’re less likely to be able to access the thinking part of their brain that they need to regulate their thoughts, feelings, and behaviours. This means that they need our support more.

3. Manage stress by considering your child’s ‘cup’

In order to regulate our emotions, we need our nervous system to be in a ‘calm and alert’ place. Sometimes our nervous system is hyperaroused - there is too much energy. This is often when we see big feelings and meltdowns. Sometimes our nervous system is hypoaroused, or has too little energy. This is when we feel tired and lethargic. In a normal day we fluctuate between these states, but for most people we feel best when we’re somewhere in the middle - “calm and alert.”

You can think about your child’s nervous system like a cup. Some kids have a really small cup. This means it gets quickly filled up (hyperaroused) and the child feels overwhelmed. Some kids have a huge cup and can handle a lot of stress before they’re overwhelmed.

I’d encourage you to consider:

what size is my child’s cup
Is this going to overflow their cup?
What can I do to ‘empty their cup’ so they have a bit more capacity to manage these stresses (some examples here might be: take a break, a big hug, noise reducing headphones, spend a few minutes getting energy out with exercise/movement, blow some bubbles)
What are signs that they are starting to near their capacity/get close to that meltdown?
Can you discuss this with your child before a possibly difficult situation and pre-plan strategies you can use to help them to feel better if they’re starting to feel overwhelmed?

4. Think about the big picture schedule

Some kids will love not being in school and not having that structure. For other kids, not having that structure and routine will be really hard. Many kids will fall somewhere in the middle.

Consider where your child falls on that spectrum. If your child needs more structure and routine, how can you support that?

One thing I find helpful is to think about ‘rhythm.’ You don’t want a super strict schedule over the holidays (it’s a nice chance for you to get a break from the usual day-to-day routine, too!). But can you have a predictable rhythm to your days?

Meals and snacks are often great things to flow the rest of the day around because they’re pretty predictable and the timing will be fairly similar. In our house, we also will try to have some quiet time after lunch. This is a predictable rhythm - my kids know that they’ll get some down time - but exactly what that looks like varies from day to day.

Using a visual schedule can also be really supportive here! You can use this both to define the rhythm in your day (maybe the meals and snacks stay up, but you change the images in between based on what’s going on that day). It also doubles as a great way to preview what will happen - bonus! You can find a free visual schedule that I use with my own family here

You can also consider your negotiables and non-negotiables within your schedule.

Maybe it’s really important that you don’t push bedtime more than 2 nights in a row. Maybe you want to be more structured with mealtimes, but bedtimes can be negotiable. Think about what works for your family here.

In light of this, remember that sleeping and eating are really important contributors to our ability to regulate our emotions. Think back to the ‘cup’ analogy in #3 - if we aren’t well slept and are eating new foods, it’s likely that this will impact our ‘cup.’

May your Christmas be Merry and Bright!

Parenting neurodivergent, anxious, and highly sensitive children can be hard. Keeping these strategies in mind (previewing, co-regulation, your child’s ‘cup,’ and thinking about the big picture schedule) will help you to navigate these holidays with more ease!

As you and your child celebrate this holiday season, I hope that it’s full of gratitude, joy, connection, and magic! I hope that you lean into your innate wisdom and trust that you are exactly the parent that your child needs.

Shannon Rolph is a pediatric Occupational Therapist and a mom to 3 (beautiful, wild, energetic) kids. She wholeheartedly believes 2 things are true: kids are amazing, and parenting can be hard. Shannon shares helpful information and practical strategies with parents and families to support them in finding more ease and joy in their parenting journeys.

Sign up for the newsletter to get Shannon’s favourite tips, strategies, and resources to support your parenting journey.

Sign up for newsletter