Making Holidays More Rewarding

At this time of year, children often seem like they are swimming in a sea of excitement and anticipation. Just thinking about future activities and gifts can be over-stimulating for everyone, but it’s also a time for creating deep meaning and a more expansive understanding of others.

Our beautiful hallway display reminds us that our community contains families from many cultures and traditions, and this season provides the perfect time to talk about holidays from an inclusive perspective. Our school has been blessed with so much diversity, and the Equity and Inclusion Committee has worked all year to expand our awareness.

We also want to be mindful that for some people, the holidays can bring painful reminders of loved ones who aren’t with us anymore. Some families are coping with serious illnesses or job losses and economic challenges. Let’s work as a community to help children gain understanding of others and the ability to meet each day with calm and kindness.

Here are some suggestions for making it a rewarding season for everyone:

Plan social activities together

Involving children in planning helps them to handle holiday activities with more resilience. Think about your child’s temperament and ways of processing excitement as you plan for social activities. How can you program in down time? How can social situations be planned so children can opt out of activities when they get tired? Be aware of signs of sensory overload and ways of escaping from situations that feel overwhelming. Stay with normal routines.

Talk about different cultural and religious traditions

Talking about diversity and varied cultural traditions helps children to grow up more knowledgeable in a pluralistic society. The United States is the most religiously diverse country in the world.

Make wishes for the season and the new year

It’s fun to make wishes for things your family can do over the next weeks and the next year, but it’s also fulfilling to make wishes for others. What about wishes for children in Ukraine? Wishes for children who are hospitalized? Let everyone in the family make a wish, and record them to review over the year.

Make physical and emotional well-being priority

Talk about the effects of eating healthy food and how our bodies feel if we eat too much sugar. Tune children to their bodies to pay attention to feel cold and tired but also to their emotional state, feeling over-excited, anxious, or stressed. Emphasize physical exercise over the holidays and into the new year. Plan ways for ways to have daily emotional check-ins. What’s going right? How can we expand that sense of well-being?

Productive Arguments

At the school coffee last Thursday morning, a mom shared her frustrations about her children fighting. Few sounds irritate parents more than the noise of sibling battle: the crying, the accusations of “unfairness,” the shouts of “He hit me!” For children without brothers or sisters, arguments occur with friends, cousins, and with us, and they can be just as agitating.

Our nervous systems don’t usually respond happily to child conflicts, especially those that involve out-sized emotions and physical aggression. After a fracas, parents rarely comment, “Wow, what a productive conflict that was,” because mostly we’re just glad it’s over.

However, if we reframe our reactions, we can see that conflicts actually have the potential to build important communication skills. There are many examples in the world around us of people who have never learned to disagree in a way that maintains positive connection and promotes mutual understanding. How can we teach those abilities?

Give attention to peacemaking, not fighting

Praise children for expressing their feelings in words, even if they are shouting. Give them positive feedback for stopping a behavior when someone asks, for listening to the other person and responding, and for proposing ways to problem-solve the situation. “I love the way you shared your ice cream, without my even asking.” Remove or separate children when there’s aggression by simply saying “Reset,” not by lecturing them about not hurting. The more negative attention they get for fighting, the more they will do it.

Make rules for conflicts

Make up rules as a family. No name calling. No hitting. No hurting someone’s heart. Start with how you feel. Teach children that productive arguments start with the word “I” – “I feel angry when you take something without asking” – not “You’re always bothering me.”

Co-regulate

We don’t want to blame children, or ourselves, for natural upsets. Getting angry at them for fighting adds fuel to the proverbial fire. One of the ways we help children handle disagreements better is by providing a calming, empathic presence, not by taking sides or trying to get to the bottom of who’s at fault. We want to build skill children’s skills. “I see you’re both angry – how can we work this out?”

Spending predictable time alone with each child also helps children to regulate themselves and can cut down on conflict.

Try not to take sides

Many behavior problems result from parents stepping in to “protect” a younger child, with the assumption the older child should know better. It’s easy to fall into asking an older child to accommodate to a littler one, because as the elder they have more self-control. This is especially true if the younger child has meltdowns. Siding with a younger child often creates anger and resentment on both sides.

Teach ways to repair

Everyone gets upset. We all hurt people’s feelings. We want to role- model apologizing and help children to understand that making up after a conflict preserves connection.

Season of Sharing: Nourishment and Warmth For Those Less Fortunate

Holidays Without Hunger

Our 15th annual Holidays Without Hunger food drive for the Food Bank of Contra Costa and Solano began Monday and continues until December 9. You’ll find a collection bin on each tier.

Here are the types of nonperishable food the Food Bank is requesting:

• Protein: Peanut butter, chili, hearty soups, dried or canned beans, canned ready-to-eat meals, canned poultry, meat, and tuna.

• Fruits and vegetables: Canned fruit in juice, 100 percent juice, canned vegetables, canned tomato products.

• Grains: Brown and enriched rice, whole-grain pasta, enriched whole-grain cereal.

The food bank asks that donations not be in glass containers and not be past their expiration dates. See the eNote we sent Sunday for more about the drive.

Warm Clothing Drive

Our Warm Clothing Drive officially begins tomorrow, but we set donation bins out last week and generous families have already begun contributing. We’re collecting new and like-new cold-weather clothing and accessories for the White Pony Express Cold Weather Project – coats and jackets, sweaters, sweatshirts, vests, hats, scarves, gloves, socks, and boots for adults and children. Look for the white collection bins on all three tiers. The drive continues until December 16.