It’s the end of May and I’ve been sitting with moms all month who are half excited about summer and half quietly dreading it — and I noticed the same handful of questions coming up again and again. So in this episode I take the most common summer struggles I hear from real moms and work through them together, because there is something genuinely helpful about knowing that what you’re carrying isn’t a personal failure — it’s a shared experience. We look at why summer actually feels harder than the school year from a nervous system standpoint, how to build a loose rhythm that keeps the overwhelm from taking over, why needing space from your kids is not a sign of insufficient love, and why filling every gap of your children’s days is doing them less good than you think. This is a practical, honest conversation about surviving and steadying yourself through the season — with the tools to actually do it.
What You Will Learn in This Episode
- Why summer triggers more irritability and reactivity in moms — and the nervous system science that explains it
- How to build a loose summer rhythm that regulates both you and your children without a rigid schedule
- Why needing space and quiet from your kids is a biological need, not a sign that you don’t love them enough
- Why a little boredom is actually one of the best things you can give your children this summer
Transcript
Summer is almost here, and if you’re feeling a little excited and also a little stressed, I want you to know you’re not alone. This is Leadership Parenting: How to Make Summer Less Stressful.
Did you know that resilience is the key to confidence and joy? As moms, it’s what we want for our kids, but it’s also what we need for ourselves. My name is Leigh Germann. I’m a therapist and I’m a mom. Join me as we explore the skills you need to know to be confident and joyful. Then get ready to teach these skills to your kids. This is Leadership Parenting, where you learn how to lead your family by showing them the way.
Because it’s one of those things that just feels better when we realize that we’re not alone. Almost every mom I talked to in May had the same look on her face when summer came up, half excited, half kind of dreading it. Like she wanted to want it more than she actually did. And when I started asking some questions, the same worries kept coming up. Maybe different words, maybe different houses with different kids, but the same underneath feeling. So I thought, why not take some of those questions and the conversations we had around them and bring them here? Because I think that’s one of the most underrated things about doing this kind of work is our community. When we’re in community, in other words, when we’re not alone, we’re talking about things that affect all of us, we get the benefit of everyone’s thinking. And more than that, we get to see that what we’re carrying isn’t a sign that something’s like independently wrong with us. It’s just the very normal experience for all of us, I think, being a mom in the summer with a multitude of feelings and situations that we’re dealing with. And I think we get so judgy about our feelings, don’t we? Like if we’re not completely thrilled about three months of our kids being at home all day that we failed some kind of test. And I just want to lay that out there before we start. These feelings are normal. So let’s look at them together and see if it doesn’t get your brain going with some ideas that actually fit your life.
The first question that I heard the most often was some version of this. Why does summer feel so much harder than the school year, even though it’s supposed to be easier? It’s that sense that we’re supposed to love summer. And in some ways, we really do, don’t we? Like longer days, no schedule, everybody home. That is very sweet in many ways. And when we say that sometimes summer feels harder than our normal school year, I just don’t know if that’s even exactly true because the stressors that we have during our school year, sometimes, not all the time, but sometimes we have the lack of those same stressors during the summer, but we get different ones. And so for a lot of moms, there’s something very sweet about summer, especially the first few days and that relief. But then something shifts. And sometimes it’s hard to put our finger on why we might feel more on edge.
I think it surprised a lot of the moms that we talked about this with is that structure that we experience during the school year, it’s not just about logistics, it’s actually something that I think our bodies and our brains need. Maybe you could even say our nervous system needs that sense of structure. So when the school year is running and our days have kind of a shape, right? We have wake up, we have drop off, we have pickup, we have homework, dinner, bed, and we may not love every part of that rhythm. And some of it might just be too much and we’re tired of it and we need something different. But the truth is, your brain kind of gets used to that. It knows what’s coming next. And that predictability actually signals safety to us. It says, I can handle this. I know this terrain. And then summer arrives and that structure shifts. Maybe it even dissolves completely. And your nervous system loses one of its anchors. And a nervous system without anchor, right, without a sense of foundation, kind of gets irritated and it gets louder and more reactive. So things that wouldn’t have normally bothered you in the school year might start wearing on you by the second week of June. And I think we just have to say that isn’t weakness. That’s what happens when a system that was keeping you regulated quietly shifts or disappears.
Dan Siegel talks about the window of tolerance. And we’ve talked a little bit about this: that we have a zone where we can think and respond and connect and be the parents we want to be. And then when we get out of that zone, we either get kind of ramped up and it feels overwhelming, maybe too much stuff’s going on. We haven’t had enough of what we need to feel like we can be in that window of tolerance. And then we feel it in our nervous systems. We start to get short-tempered, we start to get irritable, we start to feel like we might want to fight or flee. We can go the other way, get out of that window of tolerance, meaning that we feel like it’s so overwhelming, we are just going to shut down. So summer, without some intentional structure, narrows that window. So we’re not imagining that we have less patience. I think we actually do. And there’s a physiological reason for it. I always love when we can find a reason for something in our nervous system, something other than something’s wrong with us that we’re like morally failing.
And I think this leads right into the second question. How do I make a summer routine that actually works when everything does feel kind of chaotic? And we had lots of discussions with these moms about how detailed does our summer schedule need to be? Does it have to be very detailed down to the minute? And I think the consensus is we’re just talking about giving your day like some bones, right? A loose shape that your nervous system and your children’s nervous systems can lean against. Because here’s what I’ve seen total openness, just no structure at all. It doesn’t feel like freedom for very long for kids or for moms. What it starts to feel like after about a week is just unending ambiguity. And ambiguity is fatiguing because your brain has to start to anticipate what’s next. And I don’t think that’s just for you as the mom of the family. It’s for each of your children. Because as much as we’re used to the structure and maybe irritated by it sometimes, so are our kids used to the structure. And their nervous systems have grown accustomed to knowing what comes next.
So if you’ve been around your kids in that first, second, third, or maybe tenth week of summer, you’ll hear it. What’s next? What are we doing? What’s the plan? And then often they’ll fill in the gaps with what they want to do, which oftentimes is a quick kind of satisfaction to help them put their focus and their attention somewhere. And oftentimes that looks like, can I turn on the TV? Can I watch a screen? Can I play a video game? And most of the moms I talked to said they’re so tired of that being the first option. And it’s such a tempting option, isn’t it? Because when our kids are engrossed in a screen, their attention is really being taken and they’re quieter and it’s less stressful. And they’re probably not fighting as much. And they kind of disappear a little bit. Screens often regulate us. And I know that’s not a popular way to say it. We’re really used to hearing that screens are bad for us and that we need to avoid them. And I don’t know that that either end of the continuum is true that we should always be watching screens and we should never be watching screens. But I think the reality is that when a screen comes on, our attention is focused and you’ll notice that kind of the nervous system just comes down. And that’s part of what we worry about, right? Because is there enough learning going on? Is there enough curiosity going on? Are kids able to meet their needs in other ways besides being kind of lulled away into a calm nervous system through a screen interaction? Once again, it’s so important to not demonize one thing. What we’re looking at is what’s underneath this.
And so when your kids keep coming with these suggestions because they want to fill the gap in knowing what’s next, it’s normal. And our wanting to know how to handle a long day with children and make sure that they’re doing the things that we feel are really healthy for them, that can be fatiguing as well. So we want to think about it less as having a schedule and more as having anchors. And what I found is really helpful and the same as we’ve been talking about what’s helped you in the past, moms have come to this conclusion. If we can kind of break the day up into sections, like what does your morning look like? Not minute by minute, but just what’s the feel and the shape of it? What do you want to have happen in the morning? And what happens in the middle of the day? And how do the late afternoons into the evening look like in your house? How does that work for you? When we’re able to kind of block it into three sections and have those three questions, a lot of the overwhelm starts to find its own structure. And so we’re starting to look at perhaps building even a soft, flexible answer to each of those three questions. What am I going to do in the morning? What are we looking to accomplish? The middle of the day and the late afternoon or the evening. One mom I worked with put it this way after we kind of talked through it. She said it wasn’t about controlling the day. It was about not waking up every morning, having to reinvent the whole thing from scratch. That is really overwhelming. And I think that’s a beautiful way to put it.
Okay, next topic that the moms I worked with this month have brought to the table. Here it is. How do I stop feeling guilty when I need space or quiet or a break from my kids? Oh my gosh, are we supposed to need a break from our kids? Can we even say that out loud? I need a break from my children. There’s this undertow of shame around that. It’s very normal that we all feel this need to have a little break and not to be on all the time, and especially not to be cruise director of our home day in and day out all summer long. But I think that little bit of shame gets in the way of us figuring out what we’re gonna do instead. So let’s just name that when you have those thoughts, it doesn’t mean that you don’t love your children or that you’re not cut out for this, or some other mother will be doing it better and enjoying every minute. That guilt is one of the most quietly damaging things, and that comparison really shows up and causes that guilt and makes summer hard for a lot of us.
Here’s what I know. Needing personal space is not a sign of not loving your kids. It’s a sign of your nervous system being human and it requires restoration. Every human being, every single one, needs time that is not in active service of someone else. When we go long enough without breaks, what starts to surface is the worst of us, right? It’s the depleted version of us. Research on maternal well-being is so consistent on this. Mothers who protect even small pockets of daily restorative time are more emotionally available to their children, not less, because their nervous systems had a chance to come down from activation before being called up again to perform.
And the mom I mentioned earlier, who said she couldn’t recognize herself in week one of the summer, when we looked at her days, there was just no thread of time that even belonged to her. At least when her kids were in school, she had a couple of hours. Even though I think she had a toddler that was still napping, she had, you know, a small break that she was able to just not be on. And during the summer, from the moment she opened her eyes to the moment the last kid was in bed, she was on. And what we found was that fifteen minutes in the morning before the house came fully online, sometimes a short walk, maybe just a little quiet time for her to have some thoughts and kind of get ready for the day, that changed the whole shape of her days. And I think we also put another few minutes in the middle of the day. And this mom felt very comfortable using screen time in the late afternoon when it was hotter after the kids had done all the things in the morning and the afternoon, middle of the day, that felt like they were accomplishing goals and that she felt had their minds working and that they had been out playing and they’d been social and they kind of met their needs for the day. And she felt okay about putting on the screens for an hour or having independent quiet time and letting the littles nap while the older children had reading time. And that was her time.
And sometimes when you go to institute this, you’re gonna get some pushback. But I want you to remember that we’re teaching our children how to manage their own schedules and also how to live in a family where there’s a mom who would like to have an hour of unscheduled time herself. Kids will adapt to this at school. When the teachers tell them this is what they’re doing, you know, their teachers get little breaks too. I don’t know if you realize that. Whether it’s when kids are at recess or when they’re at lunch. We build this into the workplace because that’s how we function better. We should build it into our workplace at home with our children. So if you’re carrying guilt about needing space, I want to offer you this. That need is not the problem. That need is actually the signal. It’s your self-protection. It’s one of the things that your body is telling you, you need some attention. It’s waving its hand at you, letting you know your energy needs a little bit of support and it needs a boundary, not to keep your kids out, but to keep enough of you fueled and in and strong. Because you can’t lead from empty. And summer parenting requires a lot of leading.
And that brings me to the last thing I want to talk about, which is the entertainment guilt that we feel. Because I heard this one in almost every conversation, some version of it. I feel like I’m supposed to be making this magical summer for them, and I’m just surviving the day, and that doesn’t feel like enough. And the kids keep asking for more. I’m bored. I want to do something fun. Can I tell you something that research actually backs up? A little boredom is great for kids. I mean it. Unstructured time where they don’t know what to do next builds creativity, frustration tolerance, internal motivation, problem solving, all of the things we actually want for them long term. When we fill every gap for a child, we accidentally take away the very experiences that stretch those muscles.
Now, in school, almost every gap is filled. But a lot of look at our classrooms. We’ve got sometimes twenty, thirty children in a room that adults are trying to manage. They have to have a lot of structure. One of the things we’re trying to have happen more in classrooms is empty time where children are able to be creative, to create their own ideas of what they need and how to fill it. Summer is a beautiful opportunity for this, but there is friction. Kids are not comfortable here. They’re not used to it. And you’re going to hear it from your kids. I want you to hear it through a filter. I want you to understand that anytime you learn, anytime you’re growing, you’re going to feel uncomfortable. Your kids don’t know how to fill every moment of their own time yet because they don’t have that skill. And so they’re looking for us to do it for them. And I want you to resist.
Now I’m not saying that you just shoo them away and watch them flounder and try to, you know, that’s why they reach for the easy stuff. Let me watch something because that’s going to fill my gap. I’m not suggesting you just leave them on their own. We can prepare them. You can create a list of things that they can choose from. You could sit down and plan with them. Let’s create a boredom list because I know you’ve got a lot of free time this summer that you don’t usually have. And I get it that it’s hard sometimes to know what to do. And don’t you notice that sometimes when they don’t have something planned, that’s when their siblings start to fight more and they get moody and they get frustrated. They’re uncomfortable. And when we get uncomfortable, we go into fight or flight. So if you can translate everything into this is a skill, this is a nervous system thing. This is something that we need to help them bridge the gap, but you don’t have to do it for them. You don’t want to take away the experiences that are stretching these muscles. You can help them prepare for it. And if you Google boredom ideas, you’ll get a great list of things to start with. And then ask your kids.
So when your child comes to you and says, I’m bored, and you feel that immediate pull to fix it, pause, take a breath, let the boredom breathe for just a minute before you step in. Because boredom is not an emergency. It’s an invitation for our kids to figure something out. And that figuring is doing more for them than the activity that you’re scrambling to provide. You’re not your child’s entertainment director. You’re their parent. Now, the stress comes when we feel like if they’re bored, they’re going to create a lot of havoc in your home. Use that translation. Know that’s a sign that they’re feeling dysregulated. And then you can address that dysregulation. Let’s come up with a list. You go and choose. You’re literally training them how to learn not to be so bored. You know, what they need from you, more than a full summer calendar, is a mom who feels like you don’t have to do it all, like you’re not running on resentment and you’re not exhausted by July. A mom who has enough left in her to be present, and that’s what they are going to get when you feel like you have permission to not solve all these problems for them.
So let me leave you with a summary again of the three things that came up most in my conversations with moms. First, give your day some bones, just a little bit of structure, maybe break it into three pieces: a morning rhythm, a midday plan, and a late afternoon set of ideas of what you might do. Second, protect a small pocket of time that is yours so that you can reset, you can refuel, and feel just a little bit taken care of. And third, let your kids be bored, but have a plan for it. Know that they’re gonna be bored and you’re kind of bridging the gap to help them figure out what to do so that they can answer their own boredom. Those three things are not gonna solve every problem for every summer day, but they are gonna be a little bit of a guide to help you know how to transition into this different kind of time that we have, the blessing to have with our children.
When you feel the overwhelm rising, when the day starts to feel like it’s sitting on you in your chest, pause, take three slow breaths. Make sure that you let that exhale be a little longer than your inhale. Just slow it down in your body. It starts the move from being reactive to choosing your response. And from that slightly quieter place, ask yourself, what do I need right now? Do I need a little structure? Do I need more space? Do I need to be a little kinder to myself about how hard this actually is? You don’t have to solve everything. Just listen. Notice the one thing that might need your attention today and take a small step toward it. You are just as important as your children. You’re their leader. You need a little rest too.
Thank you so much for being here with me today. Reach out to each other, talk about what works, what doesn’t work. Use your community to support you as you do this great work of motherhood. I will talk to you all next week. Take care.