3 Easy Ways to Connect More With Your Child This Holiday Season
The holiday season is often a time of great stress and great excitement. While it can be fun watching your child’s eyes light up, the lack of routine during the school breaks, the chaos, and the meltdowns can be a lot to manage. It’s common to feel simultaneously overwhelmed and overstimulated, making it harder to feel like you and your child can truly connect.
However, I promise that connection can be easier in these moments than you think!
Here are three simple ways to build more connection with your child this holiday season:
1. Spend time doing something they love.
One of the most meaningful ways to connect with your child is by joining your child’s world, a sentiment I’ve coined to help parents truly understand their child. Stepping into their world involves allowing your child to teach you something about something they love. Maybe it’s playing a video game, building with Legos, drawing, or showing you their favorite holiday movie.
When your child gets to lead, they feel valued, capable, and understood. For anxious kids especially, this builds trust and emotional safety. At the same time, your child is building confidence and a deeper connection with you.
Remember, showing your child authentic interest in their world is the magic here!
2. Try something new together.
Another helpful tip when fostering connection with your child is to try something new together. There’s something welcoming about being new at something together. Trying a new activity like baking a recipe for the first time, exploring a new park or creating a holiday craft you found online creates shared excitement, vulnerability, and a fun silliness.
When you’re both learning something new, your child gets to see you try something even if it feels scary, cope in the awkward moments, and stay regulated when things don’t go perfectly.
While you’re connecting with your child, you are also showing them support, curiosity, and compassion. How cool is that?!
3. Create simple rituals of connection.
When the chaos of the holiday season starts to wreak havoc, relying on tiny connection moments and simple rituals can make all the difference. If you already have routines you do with your child often, such as reading a book before bed, I invite you to continue doing that. Connection thrives in consistency, not intensity.
If you don’t have routines, no worries, the holiday season is the perfect time to start small little moments of connection. Little rituals can anchor your child during a season that often feels overstimulating. Maybe you want to try a nightly hot chocolate “check-in” or a short walk/drive to look at lights together. I also am a big fan of a shared journal any time of year!
If your child enjoys writing or drawing, a shared journal is especially powerful. It gives them a safe space to express feelings without saying them out loud. (I talk more about this inside my course, Anxious Kids 101.)
No matter what the ritual is, it is a moment for you and your child to bond and truly connect.
Final Thoughts:
The holidays can bring big feelings and moments where things feel more intense than usual, but connection doesn’t require perfect days or perfect parenting. Joining your child’s world in small, intentional ways is the perfect guidepost back to connection for you and your child.
Even a few minutes of presence can help your child feel safer, more regulated, and more grounded during a season that can feel overwhelming for anxious or sensitive kids.
If you’re not sure where to start with finding support for your child, this page breaks down what therapy for kids in New York looks like and what to expect.
If your child is struggling with anxiety, perfectionism, or emotional ups and downs this holiday season, therapy can help. I offer virtual therapy for children, preteens, and teens across New York, helping families build emotional regulation skills and strengthen connection at home. Contact me here for more information.
