Parenting kids who sabotage big days - BTT 2017

It could be said accurately of me that I am a slow-learner.

This is our 4th Christmas with Ben and Remy home, and last year I finally tracked our history and noticed that Christmas produced an inevitable cocktail of unintentional sabotage, overreactions, and meltdowns (or total withdrawal). The best of days ended in their tears, yelling, and devastation. Until last year, I kept thinking, “Dang! I am just not getting this Christmas thing right!”

I'm I thought I failed once again to provide the perfect mix of togetherness, meaning, Advent, and memories.


I’m onto it now.

Example: For four weeks until Christmas, Remy talks about gifts/dates/plans/expectations CONSTANTLY. I mean constantly. What starts as ordinary preparation turns tense and anxious. A week or two out, it gets darker: lots of entitlement, demands, the outer edges of fit-pitching. Nothing is enough. Every Christmas activity lacks; she displays a constant state of disappointment or anger. (She had her first meltdown this year when we decorated the tree and drank hot chocolate while watching Elf. It was a total disaster for her, start to finish, no matter how we all rallied. Sydney said, “Mom? What is really going on?” EXACTLY.)

On Christmas morning, behavior turns insufferable over the smallest thing, over nothing. The “who got more” tally is in full effect (Ben particularly struggles with scarcity). The six thoughtful, loving presents are discarded for the one unreasonable, outrageous thing she didn’t get. We will absolutely hear: “This is the worst day OF MY LIFE!!” (We hear this regularly on Big Days.) She will end up crying in her bedroom, devolving into shame: “I am the worst girl! I am on the naughty list! I ruined Christmas! I’m giving all my presents away!” I feel so frustrated that I sometimes snap, making it all worse. Ultimately, I dread Big Days altogether and while she is thinking she is the worst kid (bless her), I am thinking I am definitely the worst mom.

Big Day Sabotage is no joke, man.

For all my adoption friends (as well as grownups who also sabotage Big Days unwittingly or have other kids who do), we’ve learned much about our kids’ unintentional behavior and how to help them. Maybe you find yourself wrecking Big Days like Christmas, feeling frustrated year after year at your own self. Perhaps this will be helpful for you too, dear one. So many factors contribute to this grief and self-preserving behavior; being abandoned/adopted is one contributor, but other heartbreaks result in the same reaction.

First, the WHY. This is multifaceted and certainly varies from person to person. I’ll discuss what we see in our adopted kids, and I’d love to hear your personal experiences in the comments.

WHY: For adopted kids, abandonment is a deep shame so entrenched, our kids don’t even know they are operating out of it. Whether with full memories in hand like ours or kids given up at birth, it doesn’t matter. The narrative is: I wasn’t good enough to keep. This sense of unworthiness is so deep, it takes a lifetime of intentional work to overcome. What that shame tells them is this: I am not worthy of love, happiness, or goodness. It seems ridiculous to parents who love them madly, who go to every game and concert, who sing to them and tuck them in, but those affections can’t erase the beginning of their story. They don’t feel worthy of happiness on Big Days, so they sabotage to hasten the disappointment before it gets to them first. Double bonus if their behavior triggers our anger, because then their shame is validated just like they suspected.

WHY: Big Days trigger Big Feelings. No matter the extreme (good or bad), it is all INTENSE and triggering. It conjures their most tender emotions, their most volatile responses, kind of like laughing hysterically at a funeral. Of course the reaction is outrageous, but Big is Big and when a traumatized kid opens the door to Big, everything is free to spill out. They spend so much energy keeping a lid on their pain and fear and trying to just “act normal,” so when permission is granted to feel all their feels, both ends of the spectrum dump their restrained contents and it is a cluster of hysteria.

WHY: They exit the safe space of ordinary, regulated, predictable routine and enter the scary space of extraordinary, disregulated, unpredictable practice. There is a reason adoption counselors urge parents to establish regular routines with no deviation for awhile. When their insides are out of control, it is incredibly calming to have a schedule they can count on; no big surprises to derail them, no left field scenarios to navigate, no uncertain activities to worry about. With Big Days, not only do they possess exceptional emotions (not normal), but everyone else places heightened expectations on the impending (not normal) celebration, and the stress is unmanageable.

Or the opposite. Remy places her own unreasonable expectations on Big Days. She imagines a narrative so impossible, so idealistic, so over-the-top, every normal detour is devastating. Her desire to craft the Most Perfect Day Ever reaches a fever pitch, and with the slightest wobble to the plan, she comes unraveled. She wants to control the outcome all the way to perfection, but that doesn’t exist and her inner shame trumps it anyway. She falls from an exceptional height of Expectations + “I am unworthy of happiness.”

WHY: Regret and sadness. We learned this the first year we decorated the tree. My bios received an ornament every year of their lives, and for Ben and Remy’s first Christmas, I backlogged ornaments to their birth year too. But when my big kids started hanging ornaments and declaring memories, “Remember this one!” and “This was my favorite when I was five!” and so on, Ben fell off the ledge so hard, it took two days to get him back. (Ditto: old family videos of the big kids’ childhood…) You know what? It is just sad to realize your birth family couldn’t or wouldn’t give you a happy childhood. Big Days are a reminder of what should have been but wasn’t, all that was lost, all that will never be. While their siblings happily skip through every charmed childhood Christmas memory, my littles are remembering lost birth parents, crushing poverty, and Christmases in orphanages.

Bless their precious little broken hearts.

So here is what we do to love them and help them through Big Days.

If we can, we shrink the runway to Big Days. The longer the season (THANKS FOR NOTHING CHRISTMAS SEASON THAT NOW STARTS IN OCTOBER), the greater their stress. It’s just too much to worry about for too long. So if possible, we don’t say a word until the day before or day of. On seasons like Christmas, the next suggestion is helpful…

Which is this: lower stimulation all around. I initially thought MORE Christmas was called for. Let’s make up for lost time! Let’s make so many new beautiful memories! I’ll give you all the magic you missed! But it had the opposite effect. Too much stimulus, too many feelings, too much activity, too many opportunities to sabotage. We have to keep Big Days (and seasons) simple. We cannot overschedule or overhype. The calmer an activity is, the less noise and people, the better they do. And we don’t talk about those activities until they are practically happening. Less is more.

We try to manage expectations. I am constantly bringing things low for my littles, especially with Remy who elevates all Big Days. We cast simple, manageable vision for Big Days: this is what we’ll do, this is who will be there, this is what we won’t be doing, this is about how long it will last. If possible, I address unrealistic expectations early; better now than they obsess for weeks then face disappointment times one million. (I had a hard conversation with Remy yesterday because she kept asking for an iPhone for Christmas. I finally sat her down and said, “Honey, you are not getting an iPhone. No 3rd grader in this family has ever had an iPhone. Let’s let that go right now so you don’t expect one on Christmas morning.” She had a meltdown, but now she knows. That stressor is gone. She will not worry about it for the next 10 days then despair on Christmas morning.) When they tip their hand toward unrealistic expectations, manage them then and there. Giving them everything they ask for is not healing; we have to work hard to not “make up parent” their early deficits with excess and liberties. That creates short-term happiness with long-term detriments.

Lots of touching and pauses for affection. This has a calming effect on my littles. When I see them spiraling, it helps to pull them on my lap, rub their backs, and redirect their attention for a few minutes. It is a physical solution to an emotional problem. It often works like a reset button.

Finally, we talk in advance about how Big Feelings might show up. We recall other Big Days and identify emotions. We validate, validate, validate, making sure they hear that they are NOT bad kids wrecking a perfectly good day. We talk about their fear and sadness and feelings of scarcity and how that makes them behave, and we give them full permission to feel it all. Sometimes when I consider all my kids have endured, I wonder how they even get out of bed in the morning, much less manage a Big Feelings Day with grace and restraint. We assure them that whether they get a handle on it or not, they could not possibly make us love them less, and if the worst thing that happens is they have a bad day, then no big deal. Everyone in a family gets to have bad days. It’s not a deal breaker.

Just taking that pressure off is so helpful. They feel less alone in their anxiety, confusion, and shame. They are not these hurt kids off to the side working so damn hard to keep it together while the rest of their happy, charmed-from-birth family sings carols, oblivious. We are in this together, and just knowing that makes them less afraid.

Oh, we are so grateful for these beautiful children in our family. They are treasures, overcomers, survivors. God is doing a mighty work in their hearts. We are watching Him heal them, asking for so much wisdom and patience. (It helps to take our own expectations out of the rafters, and if a Big Day goes beautifully, then HUZZAH!! If it doesn’t, it is just a day and we are looking at the long road with our littles. We’ll have beautiful Christmases when they are 34 and bringing me grandbabies.)

To all parents doing this hard work and to grown-ups with sabotaging behaviors and worries about these Big Days ahead, I just love you. We’ll just keep working, keep trying, keep loving, and keep forgiving ourselves when it all goes sideways. You are not alone, know that. So many of us are right there with you, doing the stuff, having victories and flat-out disasters. But we are trying and we care and we Love Big and that counts.

The merriest of Christmases to you, friends. And if the whole Big Day goes in the gutter, there is always the egg nog.