Parents face a mixed bag of emotions during summer breaks. On the one hand, your children having time away from school opens the door to enjoyable vacations, more time spent together, and a number of engaging summer activities. On the other hand, excess free time can lead to overwhelming parental stress and increased responsibility.

Feeling the pressure of parental stress during summer breaks is completely normal. Rather than letting this stress start to overwhelm you, a little bit of planning and preparation can help you manage your parental stress and make the most of your children’s summer break.

Tools to Manage Parental Stress

Managing parental stress during summer breaks is possible. Learning to plan your summer break activities ahead of time, understanding the different obligations you may face during summer, and taking time for your own mental health are all important components of keeping your stress levels low and manageable.

When you manage parental stress during summer breaks successfully, you can learn to truly enjoy this time spent with family rather than perpetually feeling overwhelmed when school lets out for summer.

Make a Routine

The first step in managing parental stress during summer breaks is to establish a consistent routine for yourself, your children, and other family members. Keeping a regular routine helps mitigate a number of unexpected stressors by keeping everything consistent, expected, and easy to prepare for.

Furthermore, children and teenagers typically thrive with a consistent daily structure. Try to keep set times for activities such as:

  • Family meals
  • Bedtime
  • Designated hours for activities
  • Morning routines

This schedule leaves you knowing what to expect daily and helps your children maintain a consistent routine after the school day ends. Such routines can reduce their anxiety, which, in turn, reduces parental stress.

As important as a regular routine can be, there’s no need to be completely rigid. Keeping your routines flexible can help reduce your overall stress and keep you focused on what matters most.

Planned Activities

Summer activities can keep you and your child entertained, keep your days organized, and allow them to have something to look forward to soon. To the best of your ability, try to plan these activities ahead of time so that you’re not scrambling at the last minute to try to fill up empty hours of the day.

There are countless activities you can organize for your family. Some common options include:

  • A camping trip to the lake
  • Heading to the beach
  • Family game nights
  • A trip to the zoo
  • Amusement parks
  • Arts and craft nights
  • Educational games
  • Reading sessions with your children

While it can be fun to be spontaneous, planning can help avoid the buildup of parental stress.

Split Responsibilities

As a parent, it can often feel like everything comes down to you. As much as you can, try to split the responsibilities of planning, childcare, transportation, and anything else you can with family members, your community, or professional childcare services.

Much of the parental stress people experience comes from the feeling that it is all up to them. If you’re starting to feel this stress, try talking to your spouse, partner, or family members about whether they’d be able to help so that you can take some time for yourself and work on maintaining your own mental health.

Make Time for Self-Care

Speaking of maintaining your mental health, building in some time for self-care is an important way of helping keep your parental stress under control. Self-care typically refers to any type of activity that you enjoy doing, relieves your stress, and is focused on yourself rather than the people around you.

Common examples of self-care activities include:

  • Physical exercise
  • Spending time with friends
  • Date nights
  • Meditation
  • Massage
  • Beauty care
  • Reading
  • Creative pursuits

Self-care not only helps relieve your parental stress but builds your capacity to handle more stress without feeling overwhelmed. Make self-care routines a priority, and you’ll feel less parental stress during summer break.

Look for Community Resources

Many communities have an abundance of resources that can help you manage childcare and activities during summer break. Your local library, for instance, may host reading nights for children during the summer months, or a local recreation center might host low-cost activity nights that can provide you with some much-needed downtime.

These programs are typically meant to keep kids active, engaged, and educated during the summer months. Finding these community resources can provide you and your family with an abundance of low-cost activities that keep your parental stress at bay and your children free from boredom.

Organized Sports or Extracurriculars

Getting your children enrolled in a sports league, summer camp, or special interest group during the summer can help add some structure back into the summer months. It gives you a break from having to monitor your children around the clock and keeps them working toward meaningful goals in a healthy and productive way.

Foster Independence

One of the main sources of parental stress during summer break is feeling like your child always needs your attention. Helping them find ways to play independently can give you a much-needed break and will teach your child how to find ways to entertain themselves without your constant support.

Accomplishing this could mean setting up an area in your home with a number of different activities for them to engage in. This area could include:

  • A book library
  • Art tools
  • Musical instruments
  • Games
  • Craft supplies
  • Toys

Of course, how you set up your child’s independent play area depends largely upon their age. Focus on age-appropriate tasks they can perform independently and safely so that you don’t feel constantly pressured to entertain or supervise.

When Parental Stress Becomes Too Much to Handle

Stress is an unavoidable part of everyday life. But when stress becomes constant, and you feel like you can’t catch a break, it can often lead to feeling burnt out and overwhelmed and may even transition into a mental health condition if left unaddressed.

Psychologists refer to this as chronic stress, which is associated with a host of physical and mental health risk factors. If you’ve reached this point, it might be time to seek out professional help to prevent things from getting worse and get you back to feeling your best.

Recognize Mental Health Warning Signs

Mental health warning signs can be your first indication that your stress levels are too high to manage on your own. You may experience symptoms such as:

  • Chronic fatigue
  • Feeling overwhelmed
  • Anxious thoughts
  • Not being able to relax
  • Disrupted sleep schedules, such as sleeping too much or not enough
  • Physical aches, pains, or tension
  • Nausea or upset stomach
  • Difficulty focusing or concentrating

These can all be indications that your stress has evolved into something more serious, and that mental health treatment may be needed for you to regain your clarity of mind and well-being.

Seek Professional Help

Seeking professional help for stress doesn’t have to be difficult. If you’re experiencing chronic parental stress during the summer months, there are several mental health treatment options that can help get you back on your feet and feeling your best in no time.

Individual Therapy

Talk therapy is a time-tested approach to helping people overcome all manner of mental health challenges. It provides support to people who experience everyday stress and want to find the support of a compassionate, empathetic professional.

Dozens of different styles of talk therapy could help, and an individual therapist may weave together several techniques according to what is most beneficial to you. Some of the more common and effective talk therapy techniques include:

  • Cognitive behavioral therapy
  • Dialectical behavior therapy
  • Group therapy
  • Eye-movement desensitization and reprocessing

These therapeutic styles can be delivered in both in-person and virtual formats, which provides you the option of starting the therapeutic process wherever you feel most comfortable.

In addition to simply helping people unpack their stress and find newer, healthier coping strategies, talk therapy can help mitigate the symptoms of mental health disorders such as depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder, and much more.

Ketamine-Assisted Therapy

Ketamine-assisted therapy (KAT) is a style of talk therapy that uses the dissociative psychedelic ketamine to enhance the therapeutic process. Ketamine has been used in medicine for decades as an anesthetic but has only recently been used for the treatment of mental health conditions.

In KAT, a sub-anesthetic dose of ketamine is delivered at the beginning of a talk therapy session. You’ll work one-on-one with your therapist throughout the psychedelic experience, which typically lasts around 90 minutes.

Ketamine can help people disconnect from the thought patterns that have led them to distress, depression, anxiety, or other mental health conditions. It can allow you to look at your life and behaviors objectively and speak openly with your therapist about what needs to change for you to regain your mental health and start feeling better.

Most people feel the effects of KAT straight away and report lasting improvements with just a single session. However, repeating sessions can further solidify your mental health progress and keep you feeling better for longer.

Deep Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation

If your stress has transitioned into an anxiety disorder or depression, deep transcranial magnetic stimulation (dTMS) offers an innovative and effective method of helping people achieve recovery.

In many common mental health conditions, certain brain regions become underactive. This reduction in electrical activity is responsible for many of the mental health symptoms you may feel.

Deep TMS uses advanced magnetic technology to provide brief, targeted electrical stimulation to these underactive brain regions directly. It is a completely non-invasive procedure, only requiring clients to wear a specialized cap and helmet equipped with electromagnetic coils.

These electrical impulses help kickstart these brain regions, increasing electrical activity and relieving many mental health symptoms. And the results aren’t just temporary — the increase in brain activity from dTMS lasts well beyond your treatment session and often results in total remission of your mental health condition.

Receiving dTMS typically takes place over several weeks, with symptoms gradually improving over the course of treatment. It can also be used in conjunction with other treatment methods, such as talk therapy, to further enhance the results you see.

Start Treatment With Plus by APN

Plus by APN was built from the ground up to provide innovative treatment methods for people experiencing all manner of mental health difficulties.

From traditional mental health treatment options, such as therapy or medication, to cutting-edge approaches like KAT or dTMS, our team has everything you need to put your stress firmly in the past.

To get started with treatment, reach out to one of our representatives today by calling 424.644.6486 or completing our online contact form.

References

  • “Chronic Stress.” Yale Medicine, Yale Medicine, 25 Apr. 2024, yalemedicine.org/conditions/stress-disorder.