Helping Families Transition to Fall
Four Things You Can Do to Make Your Family Happier and Healthier This Uncertain Season
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Everyone agrees we’re in a massive transition, but few agree on the best way to navigate it. All this month, a special series: Helping Families Transition to Fall.
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When my daughters were young, one of their favorite picture books was Jump into January by Stella Blackstone. The book consists of a series of illustrations with a different action for every month of the year: Splash into April, Sail into August, and so on.
This month’s directive: Slide into September.
Well, this year, we’re doing anything but sliding into September. To quote another favorite book of theirs, Thesaurus Rex, by Laya Steinberg: We’re lurching, careening, staggering, and stumbling.
As surprising as it seems, this fall feels even more unsettled than last fall. While six months ago we all expected the pandemic to be over by now; in many parts of the country, it’s worse than ever. While we all looked forward to a normal school year, the return to the classroom is proving far more complex. While we all anticipated a widespread reopening of workplaces, more and more companies have delayed that step indefinitely.
On top of it all, most of us are simply spent. With so much uncertainty, what are we supposed to say or do—for our children, our aging parents, our loved ones who are out of work, out of money, out of time, out of patience?
All this month, I’m going to be doing a special series of posts addressing these questions, exploring everything from what adults can do when their kids go back to school, to the problem with the term the new normal, to forgiveness, to the three questions you should ask your children every week.
To start us off: Four things you can do right now to help your family navigate this collective transition we’re all in.
1. Identify your emotions
The worst thing you can do in a difficult period like this one is to ignore the pandemic pachyderm in the room. That’s especially true if you have children. The scholar Amanda Morris at Oklahoma State University has found that regulating emotions—i.e., controlling the occurrence and duration of feelings, both positive and negative—is critical for promoting social and emotional health among children. The most influential force in that development: parents.
Children learn how to deal with emotions in three ways, Morris writes: 1) Modeling what their parents do; 2) participating in parent-led emotional interactions, and 3) participating in the emotional environment of their family.
The most important lesson for parents is to create a family that invites and accepts emotions as a normal part of everyday life. For starters: Start naming and sharing feelings, not stigmatizing them—I know you’re anxious; We’re all feeling unsure right now; Let’s talk about how we can get through this together.
2. Use rituals to mark the new season
In my model for navigating life transitions, one of the most overlooked features that help people through difficult times is the use of rituals to mark new phases. And what time of year has more delicious rituals that fall! As valuable as talking about emotions is to dealing with uncertainty, sometimes too many head-on, face-to-face conversations can feel daunting.
My pal Lisa Damour wrote in the New York Times last month that children who are unhappy about how this fall is shaping up have the right emotions at the time. Yet sometimes, adolescents in particular can be “more communicative when they’re not put on the spot.”
In these situations, let the pumpkins do the talking. This is a great month to visit a fall festival, go a little crazy on the gourds, maybe even succumb to pumpkin spice Armageddon. Sometime between when you’re all bobbing for apples and making TikToks, you might get to make the point: See, we’re still a family, and we’re working our way to something new.
3. Tell a story of success
Self-confidence is one of the most critical and hard-to-achieve motivators for children in all aspects of their lives, from school, to sports, to friendship. Those feelings of confidence are especially critical when children are facing stressful situations.
For young children, parents play a key role in helping develop that self-confidence. Parents who reminisce with their children, recalling a previous time that the child–or the family–faced a moment of difficulty or emotional uncertainty and how they all got through it, can help children draw strength from their own memories. Talking about positive outcomes from a negative experience has been shown to shape children’s memories of that experience.
But as children get older, they can play the parents’ role themselves. Adolescents who have a big test or sporting event who are asked to recall a previous good outcome from one of those experiences perform better on the upcoming challenge.
4. Identify this moment as a life transition
I recently gave a talk to college students and made a point that I’ve been making to my own children: I know what you’re going through is unpleasant, but the skills you’re learning will serve you for the rest of your lives. This idea is slightly different from the one I hated growing up: You don’t like broccoli; the starving children in India would love your broccoli.
My point is that the techniques you’re mastering, the callouses you’re building, and the experiences you’re accumulating are vital lifelong skills. We can all hope that COVID-19 is the last pandemic you’ll experience, but it won’t be the last lifequake you experience. The next time you do, just like you harken back to that clutch goal you scored, that good grade you received, or that act of kindness you showed to a friend, you’ll harken back to this period as proof you can do hard things. And that memory is guaranteed to give you a leg up in that situation.
The English novelist Samuel Butler captured this bittersweet lesson, perhaps best of all, when he wrote that fall can sometimes feel like a mellower season, but “what we lose in flowers we more than gain in fruits.”
HELPING FAMILIES TRANSITIONS TO FALL: Other Articles in This Series
Helping Families Transition to Fall – September 9
Adult Back to School – September 13
The Hardest Part of Forgiveness – September 15
Three Questions to Ask Your Children Every Week - September 17
The Three Most Important Things to Say to Someone in a Life Crisis – September 20
You’re In an Autobiographical Occasion. Now What? – September 22
The Noticing Game – September 24
'The New Normal:' The Problem with Everyone's Favorite Phrase – September 27
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Thanks for reading The Nonlinear Life. Please help us grow the community by subscribing, sharing, and commenting below. Also, you can learn more about me, read my introductory post, or scroll through my other posts.
You might enjoy reading these posts:
My New Ted Talk: Need a Fresh Start? How to Master a Life Transition
The #1 Secret of a Successful Life Transition
Or these books: Life Is in the Transitions, The Secrets of Happy Families, Council of Dads.
Or, you can contact me directly.
