ADHD Parenting Over Holiday Breaks
As a mom of two little kids (ages 2 and 4) who was recently diagnosed with ADHD, I wanted to share a few tips of how I get through long holiday breaks without childcare.
My ADHD largely presents itself as sensory sensitivity. My kids have their own challenges with overstimulation and emotional dysregulation.
As much as I treasure my family, spending a full day together can be challenging—for all of us. Make it a full week, and things can quickly spiral.
Here are five quick tips that have helped me keep the (relative) peace during holiday breaks:
1. Plan breakfast ahead of time.
Both my kids are selective eaters with big feelings around food, so figuring out breakfast on the fly can be stressful.
My four-year-old and I recently sat down and agreed on a daily breakfast schedule, and it’s worked wonders for lowering the proverbial temperature at breakfast time.
Now, she asks me to “read the breakfast chart” and tell her what’s on the menu. Mondays are waffles (frozen, of course), Tuesdays are bagels, Wednesdays are overnight oats, and so on.
Both kids still get some say over how the breakfast is prepared (“Do you want peanut butter or cream cheese on your bagel?”), which helps them retain a sense of control over their diet—but gone are the days of endless negotiations, and sometimes tears, over what to eat.
2. Break the screen-time rules.
Like most parents I know, my husband and I set pretty firm limits around how much screen-time our kids get each day.
But during holiday breaks (and on sick days), we loosen the reins. A lot. Cartoons are on every morning, and I frequently make popcorn and put on a movie after dinner.
There’s one key tactic that helps this avoid becoming a runaway train where the kids beg for more shows post-vacation: being explicit from the get-go that we’re breaking the rules because we’re on vacation.
Something about setting that boundary helps them understand that this is a temporary adjustment. And even if we do get some tears once normal life resumes, it’s always worth the sanity we saved during our break.
3. Put the toys away.
No, I’m not crazy. Don’t put all the toys away.
If you can muster up the energy to do ten minutes of tidying after bedtime, do this: go to the room your kids spend the most time in and grab every toy they generally seem uninterested in. Put them all in a large storage bin—I use one of those big plastic ones—and store it in the garage, the top shelf of a closet, or somewhere else out of sight. Don’t worry about sorting or donating—just get them out.
Whenever I take the time to do this, the kids start spending more time playing with the toys I’ve left in the room. And as any ADHD parent will understand, I am noticeably calmer and happier if my kids spend even five minutes playing independently.
Bonus: I get less stressed over the course of the day, because fewer toys end up scattered across the floor by bedtime.
Pro tip: If you have an extra five minutes on top of the original ten, swap in some toys that typically live in a different room of your house. It’s gratifying to see kids get excited to play with their old toys in a new setting!
4. Cook a lot of carbs.
This one is straightforward. Make a big batch of whatever carb “base” your kids are willing to eat for dinner. For us, that’s white rice and pasta.
Having these on-hand and ready to eat throughout the week makes for easy dinners when I’m exhausted and somehow can’t remember a single recipe. Pasta + jarred marinara sauce + Beyond Meat is always a winner for one kid, and pasta + butter + salt is tolerable to the other—a mealtime win in our household.
Add a fruit or veggie and milk, and a good-enough dinner is served.
5. Take your time.
This is maybe the most important tip, even if it’s the hardest one for me personally to implement. Really try to prioritize taking time for yourself.
This is, of course, dramatically easier in a two-parent situation. I am actively working on taking advantage of having a co-parent and handing off the kids. We don’t spend all our time as a family. Rather, we try to have one person watch both kids for a couple hours a day.
It often feels a little disappointing on the front-end. I have lots of romantic dreams of our family peacefully bonding over the holidays. But, as I keep learning and re-learning, we are more likely to have those heartwarming moments when they’re sandwiched between chunks of solo parenting time, rather than in the middle of a full day when both parents desperately need a break.
I’ve never been a single parent (or had a co-parent I couldn’t fully depend on), so I don’t feel like I can speak to that experience at all or offer advice here. If you’re parenting without a partner (that is SUCH HARD WORK!), I deeply hope you have a family member, close friend, or babysitter who can step in and give you a little time to yourself.
A note: even if your kids, like mine, struggle with separation anxiety, all isn’t lost. Consider staying in the house, or perhaps even the room, while someone else watches them, while allowing yourself the freedom to be on your computer/reading a book/watching a show/exercising/making a phone call/taking a shower/taking a nap — whatever it is that you need to decompress and recharge. Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good!
Conclusion
I hope that these tips are useful to some parents out there. Of course, every family’s situation is different, so your mileage may vary.
The most important thing is to show yourself some grace. It’s so easy to get wrapped up in the ideal of perfect parenting—but the perfect parent doesn’t exist. All we can do is figure out what we need to be okay, and then to creatively and strategically deploy that self-knowledge.
