16: Back to School After Winter Break: Same Kid - Better Support in January
January isn’t a reset button—and that’s okay. In this episode, I talk about why going back to school after winter break can feel harder than expected, especially for kids who already find school challenging. We explore why this transition takes time, how pressure and fatigue often show up before kids feel regulated again, and what parents can do right now to better support the same kid they had in December. Instead of chasing “new year” outcomes, I invite you to think differently about January—focusing on support, understanding, and small adjustments that can make this transition smoother for your child AND for you.
Key Takeaways:
January is a transition, not a fresh start.
Lower energy and emotional speedbumps are part of the new transition.Bumpy behavior is information, not a red flag.
Pay attention for clues about your child’s current needs.Focus on what you CAN control.
Sleep, food, downtime, and movement matter more than ever right now.Shift from outcome-based goals to support-based goals for yourself.
Aim for understanding, calm, and better support—not just results.
Resources:
5 Ways to Make Transitions Easier blog post
Managing Back-to-School Anxiety and Transitions: Tips for Parents podcast episode with Dr Gila
Let’s Talk About Grades: What They Do (and Don’t) Tell You About Your Child podcast episode
Connect with Scotti:
Transcript
16: Back to School After Winter Break: Same Kid - Better Support in January
[00:00:00] Welcome back to another episode of Unlocking School Success. It's the new year, and you may have heard the rhetoric. It's a new year, new you. Well, I'm gonna disagree when it comes to school for our struggling kids and for supporting them as parents. I'd like to offer a reframe. It's more like New year.
Still the same challenges, but the question is really how are we gonna address them in January and how can we best support them? Those are the bigger questions. We had a winter break. Maybe it was relaxing, maybe it wasn't, maybe more likely. It was a mix of both, but the transition back is a whole other challenge.
So we're gonna be talking about that transition today in this episode, and at the end I'm gonna talk a little bit about rethinking some goals for us as parents. So stick with me till [00:01:00] then.
We're about a week back into school where I live, and maybe you're thinking, shouldn't this feel easier by now? Well, me too. By this time in mid-January, these are the questions we start asking ourselves, but really, if things are feeling bumpy for you, I wanna start by just saying really clearly. It's normal, the transition back to school.
If you think about it, we've had several transitions in the last month. We had a transition out of school with all of the excitement of the holidays and whatever those involved, including travel or big changes in routine. Now we're transitioning back to school, so it's kind of been a lot of transition in this last little while, and that can be really.
Hard for a lot of kids and for us. So while January might not mean a new you or a [00:02:00] definitely doesn't mean that you have a new kid. What January really asks of us is to be something sort of different. How are we gonna support the same kid we have who is smart and funny, but also might have the same school challenges in the new year that they had in December?
So how are we gonna support them through this transition and how are we gonna think about this slightly differently? I think it's just really important to acknowledge these transitions. If you go back and listen, I had a great conversation with Dr. Gila about transitions when we were starting the beginning of the school year, and I'll.
Tag that episode in the show notes so you can go back and listen to it. 'cause I think it offered some valuable insight. But returning to school after winter break is also a really big transition. It's not a new reset button. There's not a fresh start. There's no magic that happens in January. It's just a transition back into the school year where maybe kids are [00:03:00] starting to feel tired.
Not just from all the excitement of the winter, but tired because they realize we've still got a ways to go in the school year. So this is a time of adjustment. And I wanna also normalize that this adjustment can take longer than we like, or longer than we think it should. These routines feel unfamiliar again.
Energy might be lower. Emotional regulation hasn't. Perhaps caught up yet with the school year routine. And this can be true even for kids who generally like school. So if your child isn't feeling back in the groove yet after a week or so back from break, this is not a red flag necessarily. This is valuable information.
You know that I often talk about being a detective and gathering information, and this is one more place where we can just make note of. What's happening for our kids?[00:04:00]
For my child, coming back to school where I live involves a little bit of extra pressure because for middle and high school kids here, we haven't yet finished our first semester, and that means the January comes with extra academic pressure. Students have to. Catch up if we've sort of lost a little bit of content over the winter break and we've got finals looming and other end of term projects that need to be wrapped up.
So this means students are being asked to perform before they might be fully reregulated and back into the swing of things after their time off. I've noticed that this can increase anxiety, increase emotional meltdowns, and just increased pressure to perform. So it isn't necessarily about a lack of motivation or effort, it's about really trying to restabilize themselves back into the pressure of the [00:05:00] school year.
So this is more about capacity and timing and stress load than it is about ability. So what I found actually helps in January, I'm gonna give you a couple of things to try. The first is just to acknowledge that this is a transition that's gonna take some time.
That might mean that we need to lower all the expectations that we have control over. So while school may not be a place where you can make big changes, although if the pressure on your child is getting to be too much, that's always an opportunity to have a conversation with your teacher.
But what do you have control over? Those are things like the afterschool period perhaps, or other social or family demands or extracurricular activities. Might you need to make some adjustments during this [00:06:00] longer January transition period. In my house, we're prioritizing sleep because with a teenager, sometimes on breaks.
Sleep can get very, out of routine and we needed to get that back on a better schedule. We're also prioritizing making sure they eat and have the time they need to decompress.
Maybe that means having more time after school, before homework or that they need more outdoor time or exercise. To help move their body and that can really help with regulation. That can be especially challenging in January where I live, the weather is not great, but I do find that movement can really help.
The other thing is using that curiosity and talking with our [00:07:00] kids. So we're gathering that information about what works best for them. But I'm often surprised at that we don't think to ask our kids. Just open-ended questions tend to work best, I think. How about. What feels hardest about school right now once we've come home back from break?
What about your day feels most stressful? Or what helps you feel a little bit more settled back into your routine? We're just going to listen to their answers. We're not necessarily trying to fix everything immediately, but it does give us insight and maybe we can use that insight.
Together with our own observations to make some changes to move through that transition with a little more calm, and I wanna encourage you to think about the new year in slightly different ways. [00:08:00] So we're gonna wrap up this episode, thinking about some goals for us as parents in the new year. Instead of outcome based goals, let's think instead about support based goals
instead of grades. And you can also listen to my episode all about grades. I'll link that also in the show notes, but instead of focusing on concrete things like that, let's think a little more broadly. Can one of your goals for January be to better understand how your child experiences school or to help yourself feel calmer during that afterschool time, which always helps kids also feel calmer.
Maybe you have a goal of finding the tools that you need. To help support your child in school so that you can show up for school conversations in the new year, feeling prepared. And I say to [00:09:00] set some goals, not to create pressure, but to help us think about that question I mentioned at the beginning, which is, how can we make January smoother for our kids?
So take a little bit of time, think about. How you can help make January a little bit smoother for your child, but also for yourself. And let's set our expectations. We'll be talking in future episodes about moving through the end of the school year, but while we're still in this January time period, what can we do right now that helps us feel calmer and we're collected as we move into the spring?
So in closing, I wanna encourage you to see January not to be a month where everything changes. But to be a month where you spend some time thinking about your child's needs, how we can help make this transition smoother. And really, it's not about your [00:10:00] child needing to be fixed. It's about finding the information that we need and then the tools to help us succeed so that we can be the best supports to them that we can.
Thanks so much for listening to another episode of Unlocking School Success. As always, I'll put in the show notes, information and links to the other podcast episodes that I mentioned. But, if you have a question that you'd like to see me answer in one of my podcast episodes, I'd love to hear from you.
You can email me at scotti@reframeparenting.com, or if you go to my website. Where the podcast lives, which is reframe parenting.com/podcast. Scroll to the bottom. You can see a link where you can, send to me your question there. I'd love to answer your questions in a future episode. Thanks for joining me.
