Kids First Co-Parenting with Dr. Royster

Holiday Series: But You Get Two Christmases”-Grief, Joy, And Mixed Feelings For Kids

• Dr. Karalynn Royster • Season 1 • Episode 17

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We explore how to support kids through holiday ambivalence without putting them in the middle, and why naming, validating, and coping rituals reduce stress for both kids and parents. We reframe “bad behavior” as stress signals, unpack loyalty pulls, and share simple connection rituals that steady transitions.

• normalizing mixed feelings during holiday co‑parenting 
• naming and validating emotions to build attachment 
• explaining and easing loyalty pulls between parents 
• reading behaviors as stress signals, not defiance 
• using curiosity and lowering demands to de‑escalate 
• creating simple, predictable connection rituals 
• recognizing parallel process in your own emotions 
• avoiding invalidating phrases and scorekeeping 
• steady support through routine shifts and transitions

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SPEAKER_00:

Welcome to the Kids First, a co-parenting podcast. The podcast for smart, intentional, millennial moms raising resilient kids after separation and divorce. I'm Dr. Carolyn Royster, a child psychologist, coach, and a mom. After thousands of therapy hours with kids caught in the middle of high conflict households, I'm here to help moms like you do it differently. From peaceful co-parenting to total chaos, I've got you. Here we talk boundaries, regulation, and how to raise a great kid, even if your ex is beyond difficult. We blend science with real life, and as always, keep the focus where it matters on raising great kids. This is Kids First, co-parenting. Here's the kind of hard truth about the holidays is that your kid is going to feel a lot of mixed feelings. Things can be really, really clear. They can really have a difficult relationship with one co-parent, that's very common, and still tell you how excited they are to go there for Christmas. It might be the one or two times a year they see this person. There's a couple things that we're going to walk through. I'm going to talk to you about three tips to get through this. But the big thing I really want you to keep in mind is that they can love and cherish and have a really good relationship with you and still miss your co-parent. They can feel very mixed about their relationship with their co-parent and still be excited about the presence. They can know that their love is being quote unquote bought and still be happy about the gift that they get because it is cool. It's something they really want. This episode is about really how to support your kid when they're feeling both really grateful and upset at the same time, how to keep them out of the middle, and ways that you as a parent can support them. Let's dive in. This one is not as much of like a script or an actual tool. It is a tool, but it's more like a practice. It's more a perspective change. It's more for you to be reflecting on as you move through the holidays about how to hold this difficult place with your kids. Okay. Because remember, what we're all about here is putting kids first. And how do we support kids? And so that's not something that I can just teach you in one episode and you're gonna get it. This is an ongoing experience, and it's a way that you think about the emotions that are being brought to you. And how do you hold that? And how do you manage those mixed experiences? Your main point here, the main way of thinking about this is that I need you to really think about how kids' emotional experiences and there's mixed feelings, right? The experience of missing somebody and not, you know, not wanting to be with them on Christmas Eve, or really disliking someone but still loving the Hanukkah gift they gave you, is very common. And kids in two-parent homes are constantly being pulled between these two experiences. We can also see things like grief, feeling really excited about this new holiday tradition that I do with you, mom, and also like pretty sad that Christmas doesn't look the way that it used to. I miss the way our family was, and I'm happy and excited about some of these new things you have planned. You see how that's kind of a dual reality? That's called ambivalence. Ambivalence is a way of talking about having two experiences at once. There's a book that's not really relevant here, but I use it in my clinical practice sometimes with kids. Uh, it's actually for kids in the foster care system. And I think the book is called Double Dip Feelings, but basically it uses an ice cream metaphor for kids. Like if you think about your experiences, the ice cream cone and your first scoop is chocolate, and you love chocolate, and you don't want to have to pick only one flavor. So you also get a scoop of strawberry. And how you can have two scoops on your cone at once. In reality, you can have 10 scoops on your cone at once. But the point is, you don't have to just pick one emotional experience to have. And just simply holding that for your kids is very, very powerful. And you can do this in a lot of ways. This doesn't just have to be about holidays and grief and the experience of being in a divorced family for the holidays. I've used it with my kids about things like school. We're super excited for summer break, but we're also a little bit sad because we're going to miss our friends and our teacher over the break. Two emotions can exist at once. The first kind of piece around this mixed feelings is one that you as their mom know it, you name it, and you don't shame them for it. They just get to have it and you get to accept it. Remember, all feelings are okay. And you want to hear about them because that's how we grow and develop attachment. The first piece is that you're able to name for your kids when you're noticing more than one emotion. Naming for our children is how they start to learn, oh, I'm having two feelings. I'm having an ambivalent experience right now. And that is okay. And I'm going to get curious and explore it within myself. But you don't just know how to do that as a human being. Your loving attachment figures, aka you as a parent, are the people that teach kids about their emotional experience. And so how are you doing that? You're naming it. The next piece, always when we're talking about emotions, is to validate it. That doesn't mean that you have to do that like really tacky sort of, I see that you're feeling sad and mad. Although that works. And if that fits for you genuinely, um, you use it. But you can also do something really simple like that makes sense. It makes sense that you're feeling two things at once right now. Things are a little bit confusing. See, so that might be more genuine for me to say. That doesn't mean it's more genuine for you. You have to kind of try out how you're gonna validate it. We're gonna name it, we're gonna validate it, and we're gonna speak to it and honor and witness it. We're saying things like, you can be really happy here and happy and excited to be here for this holiday dinner. And at the same time, you can be missing your dad. And that is okay. I get it. See how very simply I get it is a nice validation tool, too. Or going back to one of our earlier examples, it makes a lot of sense to me that you would love our new tradition of going to look at lights on Christmas Eve and that you would still feel sad that we're not doing hot chocolate around the fire like we did last year. Both things can be true. You can have two feelings at once: chocolate and strawberry on the cone. One kind of very specific piece that I want you to think about, especially as your kids get a little bit more language, those of you with littles are not going to be using this next skill very much, but you can really explain to kids what loyalty polls look like and how they can, they can and they are able to, and that you're accepting of them loving both of you. Right? So sometimes kids feel like they're betraying one parent if they show love or show affection or fondness or favoritism, even towards one parent. So let's say that they made one parent gift at school and they have to kind of decide who to give it to, and they give it to your co-parent instead of you. And you start noticing, wow, they are feeling some sort of way about this. You need to speak to that. You might say something like, you know, it's totally fine to love your dad as much as you love me. You don't have to pick. And it's okay that sometimes you're gonna like him more than me, and sometimes you're gonna like me more than him, and that is totally normal and fine. You never have to pick. Our love for you does not change. And you can love both of us, and you can love both of us in different ways, and we will be okay with that. I really want you to think about being a container and a place for kids to put these difficult feelings. And your job is to sort of expand that container at the holiday time. I know, I know, I know, I know the mental load that the holidays take. And I realize that sometimes expanding our bandwidth as moms can feel like a lot and can feel really overwhelming. But again, we're talking about perspective shifts and how do you help your kids through these holidays? And this is one way is internally, you're doing the work of how do I expand my ability to hold their emotional experiences along with my own. Because you may also be experiencing that. This is what we call parallel process. It's when you, as the parent, are experiencing something similar to your kid. So take the classic example. You are thrilled to be divorced. You're so happy to be away from this person. And and maybe Christmas was a really beautiful time in your relationship. Maybe you actually do really miss your in-laws at this time of year. Or maybe you do wish that you could all be together Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. And what a bummer that you're not. And gosh, that's really hard to hold. Doesn't change your decision. It can be both things at once. You can be happy that you separated. You can be sad that you separated and enjoy having Christmas Eve to yourself. You can be happy you separated and sad having Christmas Eve away from your kids. But if you didn't follow any of that, the point is whatever you are experiencing around this separation and divorce is likely not a simple, clear, like I am only happy all the time. Or I'm only sad all the time. A little bit of that second scoop of ice cream feeling is going to sneak in. And if that's happening for you, it's definitely happening for your kids. That's the piece that you're going to be speaking to. We're going to take a very quick break. I'm going to talk to you a little bit about the high conflict communication boot camp. And when we come back, we're going to talk about how to read some of these holiday behaviors that you're going to see from your kids in a way that actually supports them. I'll be right back. If you're in a constant tug of war with a difficult ex and you never know what to say back, I created a three-day high conflict communication boot camp just for you, mama. It's only$19. When I say three days, I don't mean three full days of meetings or sitting on a Zoom. Each day you're going to get a video, it's pretty short, sent to you via email. You watch it when you want, on your own time, you have it forever. With each video, you get guides and scripts and tools that you can download and keep. Over the three days, we walk through what to say and what not to say, how to decide when to respond and when you should ignore, because there are definitely times you should, and how to protect your child from the fallout. You'll get printable scripts and quick reference sheets. You can put them on your fridge or on your phone so that when that nasty little message pops up, you're not starting from scratch. If you want to feel less panicked every time your phone buzzes, join us in the High Conflict Communication Bootcamp for just$19. The link is in the show notes. As you see things with your kids that you're like, wow, that was new, or holy cow, this is a big reaction. I think it'd be helpful if you start thinking about those things instead of as like bad behavior, you see them as a stress signal from your child. Again, I'm gonna say that a different way. Read unusual, new, negative, or big behaviors as stress signals rather than bad behavior. The holidays, while they are joyous, are also very stressful for kids. What do kids love? Kids love routine. They love structure, they love to know what's happening. What do holidays love? I don't know. Being way out of routine, adding sugar, adding new foods, adding new people, adding all kinds of stuff that isn't normally happening, plus the excitement, and every aspect of their life is out of routine. So school's out of routine, they're doing fun stuff, and home is out of routine, you might have a really great schedule, but typically that gets flipped a little bit around the holidays. We have all these changes coming in, plus changes in sleep, changes in food, changes in people. And we have a recipe for kids to start showing us they're stressed out. Some of the ways that you're gonna see this show up in younger kids, they tend to be, you know, perhaps a little bit more clingy at drop-off, bedtimes might be a little bit harder. You might see some of those psychosomatic symptoms we talk about. Psychosomatic is just a really fancy word for physical. So tummy aches, headaches, physical, I should say, physical symptoms that don't have a medical cause. Young children often show us their stress through this way. I don't want to go to school, my stomach hurts. Tends to be what we see. A little bit older kids might be more shut down, less excited about some of the things they used to be really excited about. Sometimes your preteens and teens are going to have things like a too cool to care vibes. Um, or you may see the opposite. Instead of that disengagement, you might see like an overfunctioning, trying to be really extra responsible, almost like trying to be perfect in a way that you haven't seen it. Just want you to remember this isn't necessarily about your kid being a brat or ungrateful. It's really them trying to handle all the changes and the big feelings and emotions that they're experiencing right now. What can you do? So, what do you want to do when you start to see these things? Well, I want you to think about getting really curious. Because remember what we talked about before. You can have the experience of two things at once. And so for your kids, you want to be saying things, you want to be noting what you're observing. So, in a curious way. So you might say something like, I'm noticing that your tone is is pretty sassy or pretty intense, or your body's really like your shoulders are really up, or you look really like stressed. You may even say, like, your face looks a little bit like sad. And then get curious. I'm wondering, or I'm curious, if this all feels like too much, if this is all it's just too much for you, if there's a lot on your mind right now, or if you're missing your dad, I get it. And then trying to lower the bar or turn down the volume on the demands that you're giving your child. Because there are often many, many, many, many, many demands for kids around the holidays. You have to learn your lines for the school play and sing the songs and stand up straight and, you know, not worry that mom and dad are in the same room and also get your best friend a gift and figure out how to get your little half sibling something. There's just so many demands and stressors on them and their time that we do need to be kind of thoughtful about being really curious about that emotional experience. And again, for you as the mom, really taking that perspective shift of I wonder what this is about. Wonder I'm curious about this reaction. And you know, you know intuitively what's typical and what's not. Now, for those of you listening that are a few years perhaps out from the divorce, it's not the first Christmas. I do really want you to still use these perspective shifts. And the reason for that is don't make this mistake of assuming that because it's been a couple of years, your kid is okay with these things. Being stressed out about the holidays is, you know, a really common experience for kids from two homes forever. I'm a grown woman and I still have thoughts about where are we going for Thanksgiving and what are we doing for this and what are we doing for this? I'll tell you a little anecdote. So when I was young, my parents were separated. You guys know this. Divorced when I was very young. They had both remarried. Bull all of the grandparents were divorced. And so we would go to one house on Christmas Eve and one house on Christmas Day. But because we had to pack in everything, we would do our family Christmases in the morning in our houses. Then we go to one grandparent's house, usually in the midday, the other grandparents' house in the afternoon. Sometimes even more. There were some years that I would have like six, seven, eight Christmases in the span of I don't know, two days, sometimes three days. That's a lot for kids. And and yeah, speaking of holding two things in mind, yeah, it was great. It was great to get presents at both places, which by the way, please never say to kids from divorced homes, it's so great you get two holidays. They don't want two holidays people. They want their parents together. Like it's a very invalidating thing to say. But the point is, even though there was all this excitement and it was really great, it was also very stressful as a kid. It was important, it was fun. I get why my parents did that. And it's a lot. It is a lot to go from here to there, to not be able to just enjoy things before you need to get off to the next thing. Get in the car and go somewhere else. And goodness forbid it snowed or something like that, making things even more stressful. Now in my own home, we have with my own kids, our tradition is we stay home. We don't go anywhere on Christmas. We don't travel, we stay in our pajamas the whole day, we watch movies, we play with toys on the floor for the whole as long as we want. And that's because of all that hustle and bustle. I share that story, not to shame anybody, if that is your situation. But so that you can really acknowledge and sit with, even if you're very used to it. You know, even by the time I was a teenager, I'd been doing that for 10 years. It still was stressful. And it was both things. It was fun and enjoyable, and I loved seeing all those people. And it's a lot for a little body to take. That's the piece that I want you to think about. We're going to take another very short break. I'm going to tell you a little bit about the membership that we just introduced in the Kids First System. It is so exciting, you guys. Please don't miss this one. And podcast listeners get a special deal. If you're listening to this podcast and you think, wow, this is a lot, and I could learn from Dr. Royster a little bit more. Inside the Kids First co-parenting membership, I work with moms who are in exactly the same type of high conflict, two-home situations that you are. You are constantly walking on eggshells, preparing for the next court battle, worried about how your kid is doing and handling all of this, or know that they're not handling it very well. This is where you get really clear, steady support and tools. Community is what you need, and community is what we offer. The membership in real life looks like this. You get many, many, over a hundred on-demand video lessons you can watch anytime you want. You get access to any workshop that I do in the month and the past months. You get an always growing, always changing library of scripts and checklists and templates and documents. I have so many documentation templates, ways that I teach you to respond, the ability to talk to other people about should you even respond. You get weekly group coaching calls with myself and other moms in the membership that you can hop in or not and bring real situations and get feedback and guidance from me. And then, of course, you get a private moderated online community that's just for you. It is only$97 a month. I can't even, like, I can't even. And your first month for podcast listeners is$48.50. So you can come in and try it low risk first step. You can cancel anytime if it's not the right fit. If you're listening to this and you're thinking, I just need someone to tell me what to say, or I just need to know how to protect my kid with this. The membership is really for you. We have a spot for you. Join us at the link in the show notes and don't forget to look and use your coupon code PROTECTKIDS for 50% off your first month. Your final tip that I want to talk you through is what to do with these big feelings. We talked about the perspective shift. We talked about how you validate. We talked about how you get curious about it. We talked about how you observe it to kids so they can put these things together. Now you need to talk about coping. Okay, so how do you help your kids cope with this? Well, I like connection rituals when kids come back. I think you can make them holiday themed during the holiday season. So you might do, you know, a really good example is every Christmas Eve after I would come back from one parent's house, my mom and I would watch a Christmas movie, a very particular one, and we would stay up late and the tree lights would be on, and it would be this like lovely little regulating tradition. She did not ever ask me. She might ask, like, how was your day or something like that? But it wasn't like, tell me all the difficult things you felt today. It was like just this really quiet downtime that we would have together. And I really treasure it. And side note, we still do that today. But something that you do consistently, and like I said, it can be a holiday tradition. You're not doing it in the spirit of competing with your co-parent. It's not like, oh, you came home, like, let's go buy your favorite Christmas thing that's super expensive, or let's bake all our holiday cookies. It's not like that. But if baking is something you guys really do well together, or if watching a particular Christmas movie and snuggling on the couch, or if they need downtime to kind of journal or relax, or just a little reading time. You might set up like a little cozy Christmas blanket and some Christmas lights and let them do their reading. And that's your way of like, okay, I am letting you do what you need to do right now. Does that kind of make sense? The rituals are really, really happy, are really, really good and helpful. It is helpful to have that coping skill in between. If they're coming back and they're sort of dumping on you a little bit of like, well, you wouldn't believe what grandpa said, and then so-and-so did this, and then gosh, you know, maybe they're not loving your co-parent very much. And, you know, there wasn't even anything under the tree, mom. And like, can you believe that? You know, he burned the turkey again. I always think of that great scene in the Santa Claus where he tries to make Christmas, Tim Allen tries to make Christmas dinner for his son and um their divorced family, and he burns it, and they like do the thing with fire extinguisher, and then he ends up taking him to Denny's, and like all of Denny's is full of divorced dad. I mean, it's the 90s, right? So it was a very like stereotypical situation. But the point is, you, as the mom, might be hearing about that. You get curious about it, you talk about it, you say things like, Wow, it sounds like your dad really tried hard to make a nice meal for you. Kind of fun that you went to Denny's, huh? That's how I might respond to that. And you might say also though, it sounds like you were a little disappointed. You were really looking forward to having some of our traditions and they didn't really go as planned. That's how things go sometimes, you know? And then turn it into, how about I make us, you know, some popcorn and we sit down and you tell me all about it? Or we sit down and we watch that silly Santa Claus movie where something really similar happens. Just joking. But a way to kind of connect and again expand that container of where they're putting that emotional experience. So, my friends, that is what I have for you today. I am wishing you so much calm during this crazy, crazy December, full of holidays and school events and changes in the parenting plan, and life just gets real nuts. So I am wishing you as much peace and as much calm as I possibly can. I am hopeful that you got some good tools from this today. As always, I love to hear what your takeaways are. Please rate, subscribe, and share the show. It really does help us a lot. If you ever have any questions or comments or things that you'd like me to answer on the podcast, you can feel free to shoot me a DM or an email, and I'd love to hear from you. Happy holidays, my dears, and we will talk very, very soon. See you on the next episode.

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