Focusing on Family During the Holidays
By Bob Lancer

There is no more important source for your happiness than your children's happiness.  No sane parent can feel truly happy while her children feel unhappy.  But we can so easily confuse our priorities and overlook that, particularly during the holidays. 

Even outside holiday time, we can easily get caught up in the tasks of daily living to the point that we lose our bearings.  In order to check off our to-do list we might spend too little time with our child, or pay only superficial attention while we are with our child (by gazing at our blackberry every few minutes), or, sadly, we might relate with our child too harshly and impatiently because her demands distract us from what we were doing, relating to our precious child as a nuisance, when in reality nothing matters more to us.  

During the holidays, a time when so many slip into depression because they do not have a family to share the holiday with, the danger of our becoming distracted from family is actually increased because now, on top of all of our usual daily demands, we have gifts to purchase, parties to host and attend, drop-by visitors to welcome, and our children being out of school present us with increased demands to fill their spare time. As a result, at a time when our opportunity to unite with our dearest loved ones is greatest, we occasionally find ourselves in the midst of a most unpleasant, conflict-ridden time of disappointment that we wish we could forget.

The solution (The Lancer Answer) is two-fold, and fairly simple, though it requires commitment and self-discipline to execute.  First of all, avoid positive expectations. That might sound cynical, but the fact is that expecting a wonderful holiday inevitably sets you up for disappointment and resentment.  The more eagerly you look forward to the holidays, the more dissatisfied you are dooming yourself to be. Don't dread the holidays either.  In fact, you don't have to look forward to them at all.  Focus on making each day count.  Don't try to escape the humdrum of normal daily living by building yourself up to a holiday experience that will not happen as you hope.  Instead, adjust to the way you live and work and relate with your family today, each day, to make it as meaningful, fulfilling, and heartwarming as you want the now to be.  The higher your expectations, the heavier the expectations you are actually imposing on others, on life, to come through for you, and the more likely it is that you will find yourself feeling let down.  It is not life or others that is letting you down; it is the weight of the pressure of your emotional dependency that you set yourself up for.  While holidays have the potential to be very special, they are still just days in the year in the sense that anything can happen and you need to be balanced enough to deal with it.

The next step involves making your priorities clear by understanding how truly important it is to make your children's happiness your top priority.  Making children happy does not mean over-indulging them by giving into their excessive demands.  It means providing them with the clear and focused attention necessary for you to determine what it is they actually need from you in the moment.  

One major need children have is your emotionally balanced, calm, unhurried and un-harried mode of functioning.  When you lose your balanced and allow yourself to get stressed out, you cause your children to lose their balance, to get stressed; and that incites wild, uncontrollable, irrational behavior and emotional reactions from them – which further stresses you out. 

To insure that your children, and you, experience a really happy holiday of positive family fun and love, one that creates a positively memorable experience that may bring joy for a life-time, commit yourself to practicing the self-control you need to not get caught up in the temptation to expect too much of the holidays, and to get too swallowed up in all that busy-ness that leads to dizziness.  Remember that a calm, harmonious, loving household really IS more important than just about anything else you might accomplish during the holidays.