Transform This Holiday Season

With the upcoming holiday season, you may feel like Scrooge who was dreading the “Ghost of Christmas which is yet to come.” The Pandemic has created fear, sadness, and negative anticipation for many families this year. Thinking about the holidays may be causing you anxiety and confusion. Remember the Ghost of Christmas Present showed Scrooge that even the poor Cratchit family still celebrated the holidays together. During this particular holiday season, you can create wonderful memories with your children that will last a lifetime.

Here are seven strategies you can do with your children to permanently lift everyone’s spirit.

Always create something to look forward to daily: Since The Stone-

1Age, our brains have been wired for negative anticipation. We normally react with fear, sadness, loneliness, and depression when bad things happen to us. To share our laughter, joy, excitement, and cheer, we must deliberately create something we look forward to doing in the near future. Researchers tell us that positive anticipation helps to take us out of a funk quickly, as long as we are doing activities we are looking forward to doing.

Sit down as a family and discuss all of the fun activities, ideas, and events you want to do during this season. Ideas can include things like baking special family recipes, watching favorite holiday movies, looking at holiday lights, decorating the home, making, or wrapping special gifts for others. All of these special activities will get your children excited and feeling hopeful.

They will lift your spirits too.

Create a never-ending-list of activities to do with your children:

2This never-ending-list should always be growing with new ideas and activities everyone wants to do over time. Set up a special time to invite your children to help you think of as many ideas and activities they want to do together. Write the ideas down and post them in a place where your children can see them daily. Add other activities to the never-ending list, like camping, hiking, vacationing, making breakfast in the park, redecorating rooms, creating family plays, making family videos...Keep the list going until your children move out of your home.

Decide on a date to complete the first holiday activity. Aim to complete the special activity within one to three weeks of the start date. The never-ending list keeps everyone thinking about having fun together. It gives everyone a purpose and direction for the days ahead. You will find that excitement starts growing in everyone’s imagination. You are creating dreams for your family in the future.

With Your Children Into A Magical Wonderland By Dr. Deena Stacer

Select one special activity from the never-ending list that everyone in your family wants to do: Al-

3ways have a special activity going on with your family. Select another special activity to do together while you are completing the first activity. Always talk to your children about what you are going to be doing to make the special event happen.

Children stay excited about all the simple little things that they get to do with you. Their excitement becomes contagious and spreads to everyone in the family. You will notice that you will feel more positive, hopeful, and less stressed over the world situation when you are constantly creating fun things together.

Invite your children to help you do every step along the way to completing the special activity: Your

4children can help you with each of these steps. Let’s say you decide to bake holiday cookies together. You will choose one cookie recipe to make first. Talk about the recipe. Your children can write down the ingredients for the shopping list. Set a date to go to the store. Gather the ingredients and let them help put them away at home. Schedule a day and time to make and bake the cookies. Take pictures, post, and share these with family. After the cookies are made, have a taste test. Score the results. Share the cookies with others. Repeat in the same way with the next activity.

Do not be in a hurry to do everything on the same day. Taking time to spread out the small steps creates more positive anticipation for your children and keeps them excited about being with you again, in the near future. Children do not understand the concept of time. For children, time seems to take forever until an event arrives. Since you are pacing things out over a few days or weeks, your children will continue to feel close to you because the next time with you is “forever away.”

Give your children a voice and a vote in all activities you do with them.

5Just as your children get excited about the simple things you do together, you can give them an opportunity to express their opinion and vote on the special activities they want to do with you first, second and third. Children need to feel like their voice counts and that they are special. Giving them choices and helping them make decisions helps them feel valuable. You can help your children grow by offering them the chance to look up ideas and share what they have learned. You are helping them build confidence and competence.

Your children will learn powerful life skills while they have fun with

you. You can teach your children

6how to get along with others and learn communication skills. Going back to baking cookies together, you will be helping your children learn fractions when they measure ingredients. They will learn to follow instructions in a recipe. They will learn chemistry while mixing ingredients. And they will learn to work together in the kitchen with other family members.

When your children do the little steps on the way to completing the special activity you have planned, they become more appreciative for how much work it takes to complete an activity.

When you give your children guidance and challenge them to find the best solutions to solving problems they feel competent and smarter. You will also be teaching them respect. They learn respect for other people’s opinions and different skills. They learn to respect the equipment and tools needed to complete each task. You are teaching them to take responsibility for their assignments and the hard work it takes to reach a special goal.

Special activities with your family will create a magical connection and an unbreakable bond with your chil-

dren. When you follow the first six

7steps in this list with your children you will find you are constantly amazed at how magical this process becomes to your family’s emotional well-being. You will find it is easy to keep that never-ending list growing because it is so rewarding. You will want to expand special activities with other family and friends as time goes on.

You may find that your own heart will experience great laughter like Scrooge did. When he awoke, he felt full of life, and his transformation brought more delight to those he cared the most deeply about. May you feel the same delight as you experience the magical connections with your family during this holiday season and for the rest of your life. Happy Holidays. God Bless us everyone!

If you would like to learn more simple strategies that will empower you while you raise confident, resilient well-adjusted and happy children, contact Deena Stacer, PHD at Doc@Deenastacer.com.