Regulate & Rewire: An Anxiety & Depression Podcast

Nervous System Prep for Summer as a Parent

• Amanda Armstrong • Season 1 • Episode 116

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When school ends and summer begins, many parents expect a break—but what often comes instead is a spike in stress. In this episode, we explore why summer can feel more dysregulating than restful and how to support your nervous system through the transition. Learn how small, intentional shifts can help you move through this season with more calm, connection, and compassion—for yourself and your kids.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

  • Why the transition into summer can overwhelm your nervous system
  • How loose rhythms, not rigid routines, support regulation for both you and your kids
  • What co-regulation looks like in everyday moments (yes, even when it’s chaotic)
  • Why repair after rupture is more important than getting it “right” all the time
  • Simple somatic tools to anchor your body in overstimulating moments

3 Takeaways:

  1. Loose Rhythm Regulates: A flexible but predictable rhythm can soothe your nervous system and create calm for your kids.
  2. Regulation Doesn’t Have to Be Quiet: Even brief body-based practices—like shaking, orienting, or a breath reset—can make a real difference.
  3. Repair Builds Safety: You don’t have to be perfect—just willing to come back and reconnect when things go sideways.

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Email: amanda@riseaswe.com

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Amanda Armstrong  0:00  
Amanda, welcome to regulate and rewire an anxiety and depression podcast where we discuss the things I wish someone would have taught me earlier in my healing journey. I'm your host, Amanda Armstrong, and I'll be sharing my steps, my missteps, client experiences and tangible research based tools to help you regulate your nervous system, rewire your mind and reclaim your life. Thanks for being here. Now let's dive in. 

Amanda Armstrong  0:28  
Today's conversation is quite specific. For those of you who are parents of school aged kids, we are going to talk about nervous system prep for summer as a parent and for your kids, because chances are that you are already feeling that shift. Some of your kids are already out of school, or maybe they've got just a week or two left. Mine has one day left, and with summer oftentimes comes more togetherness, less structure, and a whole lot more sensory input. And while there might be parts of you that are looking forward to summer, the trips, whatever the things that this season usually holds for your family, I have also heard from many of you that this is not something that you look forward to, or that there is also parts of you that already feel overwhelmed or stretched thin and a bit more dysregulated. So today's episode is for the parents. I am not going to give you the perfect blueprint to a blissfully calm and regulated summer, because I don't think that thing exists, and if it does, it looks wildly and vastly different for every single family, but what I am going to offer is some guidance that hopefully helps you move into the summer a bit more grounded, a bit more regulated, or at least with some ideas as to what that could look like. 

Amanda Armstrong  1:57  
So from the get go, let's start by normalizing. Why summer can be so stressful, especially for parents. For a nervous system, summer often means a loss of predictable structure, an increase in stimulation, more noise, more mess, more movement, there is often fewer built in breaks or boundaries between work and home or school, and a more constant need to meet other people's needs, oftentimes before your own, and that is before we even get into the internal pressures that a lot of Parents feel of trying to make summer magical or memorable or meaningful or fun. So if you are already feeling irritable, over stimulated, like you can't catch your breath, please know that that's not a personal failing. If you feel like you are sinking even deeper into patterns of anxiety, reactivity, even shutdown or dissociation, that is your nervous system, adapting, adjusting to new, actual or perceived stressors that come with just less context, less predictability, and oftentimes a longer to do list. 

Amanda Armstrong  3:19  
And this is especially true if you are a parent who is also working, maybe you are caregiving for a child with extra needs or navigating this transition or this season without very much external support. So what can we do to move through this season differently. And today I want to offer three simple nervous system pillars for what I hope is a more regulated approach to summer. And these three pillars are rhythm, regulation and repair. If you've been around for a while, you know, I love me a good alliteration. 

Amanda Armstrong  4:03  
Let's start with rhythm. Your nervous system thrives on predictability, and when school ends, we often lose the anchor of a constant schedule, and that can affect both our kids and us as adults, as parents, you do not need a rigid plan, but having a loose rhythm can be very regulating, and it's something that kids need, even teenage ones. I'm not just talking for context. My kids are little. My kids are two and five, and at the end of summer, mid August, I am actually having our third so I am in the younger kid phase of things. My five year old is prepping to go to kindergarten. You may have teenage kids regardless their nervous systems and your nervous systems crave rhythms and predictability. So when. Meals. What are daily expectations, bedtime routines, curfews, so on, so on, so on. 

Amanda Armstrong  5:08  
So for example, like I said, Tomorrow is my son's last day of preschool. We have already talked about how this weekend, he and I are going to sit down together and make a daily schedule of things that regularly need to happen. So for him, he has a few age appropriate jobs or chores around the house. He takes the compost from the bowl on our kitchen counter to the backyard we have a glass recycling bag, and he knows when it's full. He walks it to our neighbor's recycling bin. I put his laundry in more organized piles, but he puts it away. We have an evening cleanup routine before bedtime that I would like to be a more regular practice, so he is going to be aware of his chores, and we're going to have a conversation, and I'm going to let him, to the best of his ability, come up with a system on how those can get done or need to happen, and it will also be within the boundaries of what works for me, for the family, for the system. 

Amanda Armstrong  6:16  
So most of those things are not necessarily daily tasks, but there are things that every day he needs to check in with and see. Is the glass bag full? Is there laundry today, making him accountable for managing those tasks as much again as a five year old can. And then we're also going to talk through some learning boxes to check each day, worksheets or educational app time, other boxes to check on a daily basis. For me, it's mandatory that there's outside play different things that fit within our family value systems, and what I know helps to keep me and him regulated. And honestly, I don't have a perfect list to give you, because I'm still figuring it out, and I also want him to be a part of figuring that out with me this weekend. But what I do know is that things work better for me and my kids when there is at least a loose plan in place, when there are some set, clear expectations with some flexibility.  And for more transparency, our situation is such that I have support. I have childcare Monday through Thursday, from 8am to about three, 330 while I work, so I am not trying to do all of the things working and having the kids home from school and and, and and. So there is a system of support within our family as well. 

Amanda Armstrong  7:49  
But when it comes to rhythm, I want you to think about this in two ways. Number one, what are the regular boxes to check for or with your kids? What we just talked about. This is a strategic rhythm, a schedule rhythm. It doesn't need to be rigid, but what are these regular boxes that, on a weekly or daily basis happen? But also number two is what rhythms or what patterns do you need to put in place for your own regulation. So asking yourself, what are my morning and evening anchors to regulation? Where can I build in some predictability for meal, rest time, movement, not just for my kids, but also for me too. Can I introduce micro routines like a morning check in a midday, quiet hour, end of the day, nature walk. So when it comes to rhythms, they do not have to be elaborate. Again. Some other examples of what these look like. In my house, we do music instead of screen time. In the morning, we have a reset walk or time outside after dinner. Most days, we have a bedtime flow that includes a shared regulation practice, reading certain set of songs, a prayer, what are your rhythms? And think about rhythm as scaffolding. Doesn't need to be perfect, doesn't need to be rigid. It just needs to be stable enough to hold both you and your kids. 

Amanda Armstrong  9:21  
Okay, pillar number two is regulation. When your kids are with you more often, your capacity gets tested more often. There's just no way around that, and your nervous system needs daily regulation in more frequent micro doses than it probably does during the school year. Simple tools that I have talked about before on the podcast, that we also use with all of our clients, can go a really long way, something like visual orienting, so while you're watching them play out. Side. Can you do some visual orienting or vision therapy drills to help your nervous system just get some signals of safety. So looking around the environment, I love to do, what are three things I can see, hear or touch, just some orienting so that your nervous system can move up that nervous system ladder. Just a little bit somatic shaking or swaying in the bathroom before you re enter chaos, walk into the kitchen, take a few deep breaths or drink a cold glass of water morning sunlight. These are the more reactive regulation practices, but also consider proactive regulation practices. How can you be intentional about the foundational pillars of regulated living, the foundational pillars of health, sleep, movement, nutrition, hydration, a sense of support or connection, making sure that those are still there. Because if you are under rested, if you are over caffeinated, if you are calorically depleted or nutritionally depleted, that is going to put an incredible stress load on your nervous system too. That is going to make the extra of summer with your kids feel even harder. 

Amanda Armstrong  11:13  
And something I want to share is that I also have some regulated parenting mantras that save me in moments when I feel explosive and my two go to mantras are number one, firm but kind and number two. Ooh, how developmentally appropriate of them. First firm but kind this usually anchors me enough not to yell or throw out unrelated punishments or threats. It usually looks like me calmly repeating myself. So when I'm starting to feel in my system that escalation, usually I catch it when it gets caught in my throat, I often have shared on this podcast that I have kind of two default ways or default urges of how to parent. Number one is I often feel the urge to yell. I don't think I'm a parent who yells very often, but I am a parent who often feels the urge to yell, and I am super grateful for my somatic awareness and my practices and a lot of intentional work that I've done to not be a parent who yells all the time, but I am a parent who has the urge to yell all of the time, and the other is to placate is just to give the kid what they want to make my life easier again, I don't think I do that often, at least not often, as often now as I used to, but I feel the urge often, and so because I've become intimately familiar with the urge to yell, I have tools. I have practices. Usually it's a physiological sigh or a big exhale, because I'm probably holding my breath. And then quickly enters this mantra I've repeated a million times, firm but kind, firm but kind. And what that typically looks like in action is me, instead of exploding, instead of yelling, is calmly repeating myself and then often letting my kid know, like I've already given you an answer to that, and I'm not going to talk about it anymore, and then I don't. And if he keeps asking the same question, because a five year old is a broken record most of the time, I will, a couple times, just ignore it, and then I'll calmly Look at him. I'm not talking about this anymore. If you'd like to talk to me about something different, I will respond, and sometimes that leads to meltdowns. But something I've noticed lately is that the more often I have held the firm but kind boundary, specifically in the situation where I've used the repetitive rhetoric of you've been given an answer, I'm not going to talk about this anymore, he moves on more quickly, because he knows I'm serious. He knows I'm not going to reconsider, I'm not renegotiating, and I'm also not going to re engage in that conversation. 

Amanda Armstrong  14:11  
And then mantra number two is how developmentally appropriate of them to insert, to spill, to yell, to hit, to be mad, to fall and get a bloody knee. Whatever it is that is giving me pause or feels like it's just one drop in my stress bucket too much that I'm leading to overflow, and usually my brain says it in that dryly sarcastic, slightly humorous tone, because that's what gets me through, like, Oh my gosh. Do you know how many times I wiped up, spilt something a few days ago for my two year old? So many times, like, the limit does not exist. I was like, how developmentally appropriate of him to spill that again? And we got. Through. 

Amanda Armstrong  15:01  
One thing to know is that your kids need you regulated the young ones, for sure, but even the teenagers like I mentioned earlier, none of their brains are fully developed yet, and you and your regulation are their anchors. They will storm no matter how regulated you are, no matter how perfectly you respond, kids are still going to have big feelings. They're still going to be disappointed. They're still going to be mad, especially if you're doing your job right as a parent. And can you stay regulated? Can you be an anchor of regulation while they storm around you to eventually recalibrate to. I cannot emphasize this enough that taking care of your nervous system is the number one way to support theirs, and we have actually had a number of parents, mostly from the podcast, reach out about our coaching lately, with this specific goal and realization, I need to learn how to do this for me so that I can better support them in this as well. Another kind of caveat to that is you can also teach your kids about intentional regulation. You can let them learn and try alongside you. 

Amanda Armstrong  16:23  
It could be a shared breathing game. I often will have my kid on the porch with me. I'm like, Okay, what's two things we can see? What are two things you can hear? What are two things you can touch, helping them tap into the different orienting somatic breath tools and practices that you're seeking to use as resources for yourself as well. I will sometimes say, Okay, two minute pause. Let's name what our body feels like right now. How do we know that we're happy or excited or frustrated or mad? You are not just regulating yourself for your kids. You can also regulate with them, and that's, again, how their systems learn over time as well. All right. 

Amanda Armstrong  17:05  
Pillar number three is repair. Let me say this very clearly. Ruptures are inevitable. You will snap, you will shut down, you will get touched out over stimulated and dysregulated. But repair is powerful, and it is a key part to secure attachment to nervous system health, to regulation when you lose your temper or miss a cue or yell before you catch yourself the moment after, oftentimes matters just as much. One of my favorite statistics that I have heard about parenting is that you actually only have to get it right about 30% of the time for your kid to feel securely attached, loved, supported. That means 70% of the time it's okay to be misaligned in meeting their needs, or how you respond, or whatever it is, but what matters most about that 70% of misalignment or rupture is how and how often I step back in for the repair. And this could be something as simple as I was feeling overwhelmed and I snapped, that's not your fault. I am going to take a break and we can try again. Or what I said to my son just yesterday, sorry, mom yelled. My feelings got really big, and I don't like when I yell either, and this is going to sound different for different kids, and it's going to sound different for different aged kids, but it's not your kid's fault that you snap or that you yell or that you threaten that's on you, and it is not fair to be like, Well, if you just would listen, then I wouldn't yell. I will never forget the first time I heard someone say, you know that you can hold a boundary, or you know that you can, like, issue a consequence to your kid without being mad, I was like, what? Oh, what could that look like? We are responsible for, the ways that we show up in response to and reaction to our children. And so taking a look at what that looks like for you and saying, Do I feel good about that most of the time? Do I know how to take personal accountability when I show up in a way as a parent that doesn't feel in alignment with how I want to and how do I articulate that and get on the same team as my kid to build trust and to repair clear boundaries and repair they teach kids safety, not perfection, but repairable safety, and I think all of us benefit from believing that. Safety and relationship is genuinely repairable. So with this pillar, you do not need to get it right all the time. You just need to be willing to come back, because inevitably, summer's gonna push your limits. 

Amanda Armstrong  20:14  
Now, before I wrap up, I wanna offer a quick reminder you are not a background character to your kids summer, your needs. Do not go on hold just because school is out. So asking yourself, being intentional about what supports you right now, maybe taking some time putting pen to paper, reflecting on this in therapy or a coaching session, however, whatever, but ask yourself, what is one rhythm or habit that helps me to reconnect to myself, that helps me to be or return to regulation? Another question might be, what boundary or boundaries need to be in place to protect my energy, or what support Can I ask for before it becomes urgent, before I become burnt out, touched out to the extreme, and some of these things for me are that I consistently get enough sleep that I have time to go on an early morning walk before the House wakes up. Occasionally my kid comes on that with me, but a lot of times, it's just me. For me that's having childcare and planning at least one solo pocket of time per week. These things are not luxuries. They are how I stay human. They are how I stay regulated enough to show up in my role as a parent in a way that works for me and my family and with the conversation we've had today. If there is anything that would feel helpful for me to elaborate on, if you have any follow up questions, or you want to share a specific circumstance or situation about your family or whatever it is.

Amanda Armstrong  22:06  
I want to remind you that at the bottom of all of my show notes for every episode on this podcast, I have a link to a really simple support form where you can write in questions, where you can share specific situations or scenarios in your life where you want feedback, you want support. In fact, next week's episode is going to be a direct response to something that somebody wrote in so if you are listening to this or any past or future podcasts and have a question, or you find yourself just wanting a nervous system approach to X, Y or Z in your life. Share it with me. I would love to hear from you responding to those are some of my favorite episodes to put together, because it feels like we really have a community, that we're really having conversations here that are personal on the podcast. 

Amanda Armstrong  22:57  
Now, to close today's episode, I'm going to do it a little bit differently. In just a moment, I am going to offer the three takeaways like usual, but then I am going to immediately follow that up with a short, yeah, I don't know, like two ish minute mindfulness practice that you can come back to anytime this summer that you need a bit of reset or a reminder of these three pillars. 

Amanda Armstrong  23:29  
So three takeaways, number one, rhythm regulates. You don't need a rigid summer schedule, but what you likely do need are a few predictable daily anchors, a morning walk, particular meal times, a set of things that just need to get checked in some way to help your nervous system and your kids nervous system to feel more grounded, because there is some measure of consistency and predictability. 

Amanda Armstrong  24:01  
Number two is that repair matters more than perfection. You're going to get dysregulated. You're going to snap. It's normal. What matters most is how you come back, a simple, honest repair with your kid and or your partners too, right? I think sometimes our partners can get the worst of us in summer. It builds safety and connection within those relationships. 

Amanda Armstrong  24:28  
And number three, your regulation is not optional. The more you care for, show up and learn how to regulate your own nervous system, the more capacity that you will have to parent in the way that you want to not just as a reaction to stress. 

Amanda Armstrong  24:48  
All right, now we're going to shift gears into a very short guided practice. So if you are driving or walking. Talking or listening to this while multitasking. This is a part of the episode you'll want to come back to. But if you're sitting or in a place where you can pause and sit for a moment, I invite you to join me. 

Amanda Armstrong  25:14  
We'll start by placing one hand on your chest and the other on your belly, if it makes sense to do so. 

Amanda Armstrong  25:24  
Gently, close your eyes and take a breath. Inhale gently through your nose, Feel your belly rise underneath your hand and slowly exhale out your mouth like a sigh. 

Amanda Armstrong  25:46  
Again, gentle, inhale through your nose, sighing, exhale out your mouth, now allowing your breath to settle into a natural and steady rhythm 

Amanda Armstrong  26:12  
and take a moment to just check in. How am I doing? How do I feel right now, how full is my stress bucket?

Amanda Armstrong  26:40  
And then tuning into your body and asking, where is my body, asking for support today?

Amanda Armstrong  26:53  
what is a basic physiological need that, if met, would give me more capacity?

Amanda Armstrong  27:13  
What's one small shift that could help me feel more held, more supported this week?

Amanda Armstrong  27:35  
continuing to breathe in and out. 

Amanda Armstrong  27:44  
As I offer a reminder that you don't need to overhaul your life to find a bit more nervous system regulation. You need rhythms. You need repair. You need a few real, repeatable regulation tools you deserve to feel good while being the parent that your kids need. Taking a final moment with these few breaths to get clear on what is one thing today that could help you feel good while being the parent your kid needs you.

Amanda Armstrong  28:44  
You can let your hands fall down gently, blink those eyes open. 

Amanda Armstrong  28:52  
Thank you for being here for all the invisible work that happens as a parent. If you found this episode helpful, I encourage you to forward it to a friend, share it with people that you know who might be moving through summer with a full plate. And as always, check out the links and show notes for ways that we support folks every day inside our coaching programs to step into more regulated lives and more regulated parenting. And until next week, I'm sending hope and healing your way. 

Amanda Armstrong  29:27  
Thanks for listening to another episode of The regulate and rewire podcast. If you enjoyed what you heard today, please subscribe and leave a five star review to help us get these powerful tools out to even more people who need them, and if you yourself are looking for more personalized support and applying what you've learned today, consider joining me inside rise my monthly mental health membership and nervous system healing space, or apply for our one on one anxiety and depression coaching program, restore. I've shared a link for more information to both and. In the show notes, again, thanks so much for being here, and I'll see you next time you.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai