All family holidays can be challenging for children living separately from their parents, and parental holidays (Mother’s Day and Father’s Day) are no exception.
Residents at our Home often struggle with parental holiday difficulties, especially in their first year. Let’s delve into the nature of children’s and teens’ complex emotions and challenges during parental holidays and offer our advice on approaching them with love and compassion.
Understanding Parental Holiday Difficulties
Accept the Intense Feelings
Foster and adoptive families can experience growing pains in new home situations. For foster and adoptive parents, it can be difficult to get a read on how well children and teens are integrating—let alone how they feel about parental holidays.
It’s natural for children to feel a mix of complex emotions during a transition between two home situations. These intense feelings can happen at any time and can manifest in one of the following ways:
- Self-isolative tendencies on Mother’s or Father’s Day, hiding alone in a quieter room or corner at celebratory gatherings or wanting to be left alone in their bedroom at home
- Internalizing feelings
- Denial of feelings
- Resistance to bond with new/current family
- Behavior characteristic of a depressive episode
- Defiance and disobedience against new/current family and authority figures
- Anxiety or panic attacks
- Confiding in those they trust about their feelings
- Making changes to appearance
- Destructive behavior
- Outbursts
- Overstimulation responses
- Dissociation
- Attempts to run away
Even if you do your best to understand the mental pressure and emotional suffering of children and teens in these instances, you must be willing to accept their feelings as reasonable and authentic. This doesn’t mean you let them act out destructively on parental holidays or otherwise; however, it does mean for you to be patient and sensitive, affording them the time they need to come seek you out.
Communicate & Listen
Every relationship thrives best with two-way, open communication. However, you can only become a source of comfort and love for your child on parental holidays by letting them begin the conversation, listening with genuine interest and concern.
We advise you not to jump at the first chance to talk to your children about parental holidays if they aren’t ready to. Let them be the ones who decide to bring it up. Trying to force a conversation will only make everyone irritable, uncomfortable, and distrusting. Just listen, respond, and follow the flow of the conversation!
Respect Their Boundaries
Teaching your children and teens about healthy emotional expression and communication is important, but pressuring them to talk about something distressing on a difficult day is not healthy or helpful. Don’t question if they want to end the conversation, even if they brought it up—that could be seen as crossing a boundary you wish to ultimately bridge.
There’s No Time Limit on Grief
Remember everyone responds differently to parental separation, no matter the cause, and that you can’t predict when the hard feelings will ease because of how grief works. Stay consistent and long suffering in giving them grace, comfort, and understanding.
Our Experience, Home, and Mission
Our house parents are no strangers to addressing the intense emotions and behaviors of children and teens from difficult home situations. Our house parents can attest that time and solid support are the most influential factors in guiding children to heal and accept their parental holiday difficulties.
At the Home, we also reflect on Psalm 68:5, which says that God is a father to the fatherless, and we aim to mirror this radically unconditional and compassionate love to our residents in all we do.
Our mission at the Alabama Freewill Baptist Children’s Home is to be a loving, Christian home for our residents, to provide them with a fulfilling and enriching life despite their challenges, and to share Christ’s love for them always.
If you’d like to be a blessing to our home, please donate your gifts as you are able, or learn more about our ministry right here on our blog!
*House families are groups of our residents divided by age and gender who live together in a house on our campus and offer love, care, and guidance to one another.