It’s that time of year when many of us are getting ready to celebrate the holidays, whether that’s finalizing travel plans, preparing to host visitors or buying last minute gifts. But the holidays can also stir up stress, from parents struggling to maintain some semblance of routine for kids out of school to intergenerational conflicts over expectations about traditions to uphold. And for some immigrant families, a season that’s supposed to be filled with joy and socializing may instead be another reminder of the fear, anxiety and isolation they’re currently experiencing.
Two licensed psychologists from the University of Oregon join us to share tips for managing stress during the holiday season and what they’re hearing from community members in Eugene and Springfield who receive free or low-cost counseling at UO’s HEDCO Clinic. Anne Marie Mauricio is an associate research professor at the Prevention Science Institute and faculty in counseling psychology and human services at the UO College of Education. Cindy Huang is an associate professor in counseling psychology and human services at the UO College of Education.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. The holiday season is a time of joy and togetherness, of family traditions and cozy relaxation, of Hallmark movie happy endings … Or so the story goes. It can also be a time of spiking stress, according to numerous studies by groups like the American Psychological Association, the American Heart Association and the National Alliance of Mental Illness.
We want to know how you are doing right now. If travel and gift buying or family dynamics are causing you stress, we welcome your stories of holiday challenges and also your coping strategies. Our phone lines are open.
I’m joined now by two licensed psychologists from the University of Oregon. Anne Marie Mauricio and Cindy Huang are professors in counseling psychology and human services at the university’s College of Education. It’s great to have both of you on the show.
Cindy Huang: Thanks for having us.
Anne Marie Mauricio: Great to be here.
Miller: Cindy, first – why do you think it is that the holiday season has consistently been found to be one of the most stressful times of the year?
Huang: I think there’s a lot of reasons, but the main one that I can identify is just the expectation. You even started the segment with the holiday season is painted by this Hallmark image of what it’s supposed to be. Human nature, when we get stuck in any sort of expectation, anything that goes outside of those expectations can lead to stress. So I think, over time, we have just built up this expectation of what the holidays are supposed to be. And then when you become a parent, you feel the pressure to then give your kids the same expectations that you had growing up, and it just keeps going.
Miller: Anne Marie, what’s your take on why these weeks can be so stressful?
Mauricio: Yeah, I agree with what Cindy said, there are expectations. And I think that expectations lead to thoughts, for example, “I should do this,” “the holiday should look like this,” sort of lead to a spiral where you then have more expectations and you start to feel more stressed. So I think being aware of when you have those expectations, what’s the thoughts that are coming up for you, and then reframing and thinking about how else can we do this, let’s find a new way.
Miller: Cindy, you’ve done a lot of research on immigrant families with a focus on Asian immigrant youth. Have you found particular holiday season stressors among these groups?
Huang: I think in general when it comes to traditions – when I think about the holidays, I think a lot about traditions – traditions in immigrant families can look different. We could call it pressure, but a desire to merge and bring in traditions from one’s own countries of origin. And then that can be a balancing act of traditions you’re embracing and learning about in your new culture here in the U.S. So among immigrant families, we see this tension sometimes play out with generational differences – kids who are very much raised and growing up in the context of mainstream American culture with the holiday season, Christmas, and then their home traditions, whatever that may be.
Among Asian immigrants, I was actually reflecting on this recently, Christmas may not be the biggest holiday. I’ll just speak about myself. Chinese New Year, Lunar New Year is the largest holiday, and that’s oftentimes when families come together. But that time doesn’t correspond very well with the U.S. calendar.
Miller: That’s still a couple of months away, right?
Huang: Exactly, exactly. So what you have seen in families, including my own, is a merging of U.S. holidays with Lunar New Year celebrations. So Christmas time or the holiday season becomes a time when families can get together because you’re off school, because there’s just more time and availability for families together. So there’s this merging of traditions that you see. And I’d say that’s an example of things that can go well and things that you’ll see, and I think this is common in a lot of other immigrant families as well.
Miller: I like the way you phrase that, because it seems like it could be a point of tension or it could be a point of possibility and of merging. But it seems like it takes work and cooperation, or compromise and goodwill in order for it to work, right?
Huang: Yes, it’s a lot of work, and this is where the family dynamics can really come into play. And going back to stress, this can cause stress. Because you always have that tension of, depending on the family, the parents, or maybe even older generations, grandparents, etc. wanting to maintain certain traditions. And those traditions may or may not be embraced by the younger generation.
Miller: What advice do you have for parents for how to talk either younger kids or older kids about the importance of traditions, about what this means for Grandma?
Huang: So I think for parents, have flexibility, being flexible in their conversations and their approach, and helping their kids understand why this is done, versus “we do this because this is what we do” – that almost never goes well. To have an approach of, “Hey, this is a tradition, where does it come from and what does it represent?” And I think to add to that personalizing it, “This is what it represents for your grandma. This is what it represents for me. This is what it represents for us.” And then I think, for older kids, let’s say as a teen, having then the additional, “What does it represent for you? What would you like it to look like?” Having it be more of a conversation, so that you can get their buy-in into the tradition.
Miller: As you were describing that, it struck me that – this is not the season of Passover – but in the Jewish tradition, there is this tradition of the Four Questions, where it’s embedded in part of the Seder where kids of different ages are supposed to ask different kinds of questions about, basically, “Why are we doing this? What does this mean to you?” And it’s a part of the service in a very sort of talky, question-based tradition.
Anne Marie, just to switch gears a little bit, this has obviously been a time of immense stress in many Latino households because of the increase in federal immigration enforcement. Do you have a sense for what’s happening now when the holiday season is layered on top of that?
Mauricio: I can only speak for the families that we have worked with and I can say that they are feeling that additional stress. They don’t feel freedom to celebrate in the way that they’d like to, in the way that they would with other family members. And then this is actually having a trickle-down effect to their children, who are then having feelings and emotions about the situation. I think in some ways it’s taking the holidays away from them.
And then also, I think that what we’ve seen in our communities is that a lot of attention is being paid to what is happening on a national level, in terms of the threat to our Latine communities, as should be. And I think when you’re giving so much attention to something that’s so important, essentially a survival issue, that it’s hard to have energy for the other things that maybe don’t feel so much like survival, if you will.
Miller: I want to listen to a voicemail that came in. Let’s have a listen.
Caller [Voicemail]: My name is Fatima. And I’m calling because this holiday season, cannot wait for it to be over because I recently got laid off. And there’s the stress of traveling to see family when you really don’t feel like it. And then there’s the stress of still trying to figure out what gifts to purchase when you’re not financially OK, expectations. So yeah, I cannot wait for December to be over so we can go back to focusing on job hunting and not pretend that everything is OK.
Miller: Fatima, thank you so much for that call.
Cindy, you talked about expectations earlier. For a lot of people, the holiday season, one of the big expectations, especially for people with kids – but not just for kids, for all of us – gifts are a big part. And as we were hearing from Fatima, it’s layered on top of a lot of financial challenges for a lot of people right now. What advice do you have for people about how to manage those expectations?
Huang: That’s so tough and I really feel for you, Fatima. You’re not the only one experiencing this right now, this is very common, unfortunately. For me, it goes back to setting realistic expectations for yourself, and what’s realistic will change moment to moment, season to season. So this season is not a good time for excessive gifts, or gifts at all. I think that’s what’s realistic, that’s reality.
And I want to reference what Anne Marie said earlier, it’s about thinking, seeing what those thoughts are. What are the thoughts that are coming for people, the thought of maybe not providing gifts, because they can’t or because they need that money for necessities. What may come up? I can imagine for some parents, there may be guilt around not being able to provide that for family or for their children. And I would say once you can identify what those thoughts are, it’s easier to then move forward with, “OK, and what can we still do?” That still keeps the holiday season enjoyable and may not cost us much money. Activities, free activities, family time, spending time together.
One thing I heard in that message was the pressure to travel and see family, which comes with a cost. Everything goes back to the financial aspect of celebrating. And I would say setting the expectation that you can’t this year, and that just has to be OK.
Miller: Anne Marie, there is the financial question of travel and of seeing family. And there’s also the more emotional one, the pressure, especially when so many of us now live far away from friends or family, when so many folks have blended families, families of divorce or all kinds of combinations of people. But the end result being that there are just a lot of people all over the place, and often now, a lot of pressure to see everybody. How do you recommend people navigate that?
Mauricio: I would say take a step back, and if you’re thinking about a family, you can have a family meeting and work together to say, “What do we want our holiday season to look like? Here are all these things pulling on us, here are all these pressures. What do we want and what is that going to look like?” You’re proactively getting ahead of things, identifying what it is you want and then coming up with a plan to get there. I think just proactively identifying that this is going to be hard, there’s going to be pressures. But let’s name them, let’s think about how we address them, what do we want our holiday season to be?
I think we so often put ourselves aside. We so often put what we want or what our family might want aside to please others. And I think maybe being aware of that, and being aware of that dynamic and naming it, and then trying to rewrite that story, if you will.
Miller: How do you think, Anne Marie, about advice for people who are navigating serious political differences with their family members, which in a lot of families have just become harder to ignore over the last decade?
Mauricio: That is a great question. And that comes up in the work we do with families. Extended family members sometimes may have a very different opinion from the family we’re working with and how they want to know how you navigate that. And I say don’t. Don’t address it.
Miller: Don’t use Christmas, or Thanksgiving, or Hanukkah, or Kwanzaa as a time to really dig deep into political differences?
Mauricio: Exactly. Be clear that this is not something we’re going to do. Talk with your extended family members, set those boundaries ahead of time, know that expectation. And have conversations with your kids, too, about it: “If this comes up, this is what we’re gonna say or this is what we’re gonna do.” Don’t go there. Yes, you want to navigate it, but navigate it by, it’s OK to set boundaries, and it’s OK to set parameters and have some rules around it with your extended family members. That can be really hard if those extended family members are your elders. But that could be very important to do as well.
Miller: Cindy, I’m gonna turn to another parenting question for you. One of the challenges for families, especially of younger kids, is that the extended school break of the holidays means an extended break from regular routines, of eating and bedtimes. But that’s also one of the pleasures of the holiday season. How do you think about that balance?
Huang: Yeah, that is such a balance. As a parent myself, I’m about to go through that and there’s always anxiety that comes up. But I will say my recommendation is always keep a routine of some sort with some flexibility. I think generally speaking, whether you’re traveling or just staying at home, maintaining some semblance of a routine. There is still a bedtime. Maybe that bedtime is a little bit extended because there’s nothing to wake up for the next morning. But you’re still doing the same routines leading up to that bedtime. You’re waking up at a reasonable time and still going through the routines that you normally would be, and keeping the important routines. What you’re doing within the day, maintaining some flexibility, still having some expectations, not overplanning.
And then I would say one thing that comes up often during the extended breaks are screen time. And I just want to tell parents out there, it’s OK to have a little bit more screen time as long as you’re monitoring what they’re watching and doing, all the same safety precautions out there. But a little bit more is going to be OK, because we also have to keep ourselves sane.
Miller: What are you most looking forward to in the coming weeks?
Huang: I’m just looking forward to having some time with my kids. I think we are in such a busy time, and this year in particular, for probably lots of reasons, it has felt busier than ever. Time has gone by so quickly. Being able to spend some of that time and just sit, and maybe come up with some traditions with my kids that we haven’t really talked about. My kids are now getting to an age where they have voice and their own ideas about what they want.
Miller: Cindy and Anne Marie, thanks very much.
Huang: Thank you.
Mauricio: Thank you.
Miller: Cindy Huang and Anne Marie Mauricio are both professors of psychology from the University of Oregon.
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