For autism families, “making the most of summer” means something very different than it does for everyone else. In this episode of The Autism Mom Coach, Lisa gets honest about the years she turned summer into a pressure cooker—laminating flashcards, buying stacks of workbooks, and treating the break as her job to catch Ben up and prevent regression—and how that anxiety leaked straight into her parenting. She shares what finally worked instead: setting small, genuinely achievable goals, weaving learning into her son’s interests, and managing the fearful thoughts that quietly run so many autism-mom summers.
In this episode, you’ll learn:
• Why the fear of summer regression and the pressure to keep your child academically “on par” tends to backfire, leaving you either dysregulated and irritable or avoiding the work entirely while feeling like you’re failing.
• How to set realistic, smaller-than-you-think summer goals so both you and your child get consistent wins instead of burning out on day three. • Practical, low-pressure ways to keep learning going—closed captions on favorite shows, a few key workbook pages, short high-interest books—and why managing your own thoughts is the hardest and most important part.
Related episodes:
- The Summer of the Sitter: Why There Are No Perfect Plans in Autism Parenting (Ep #170)
- Stop Googling Autism: Why More Information Isn’t Helping You (Ep #138)
- How to Trust Yourself as an Autism Mom (Ep #63)
Schedule a consultation call with Lisa:
Listen here:
Transcript:
You are listening to episode 172 of the Autism Mom Coach, how to avoid summer regression and overwhelm. Welcome to the Autism Mom Coach podcast. I am your host, Lisa Candra. I am a lawyer, a life coach, and most importantly, I am the full-time single mother of a teenager with autism. In this podcast, I am going to share with you the tools and strategies you need so you can fight like hell for your child without burning out.
Let’s get to it. I love the summer, but I don’t look forward to it, or I haven’t since Ben was diagnosed because the term making the most of summer, I think that means very different things to parents of children with autism and to parents of neurotypical kids. As I was having coffee with a few of my friends, all of whom have neurotypical kids, they were talking about things like which camp their kids were gonna go to, which sports camps they would go to, vacations, trips, all that kind of a thing.
I was so struck by this for two reasons. First, my planning for the summer for my son begins in February and two when I think of making the most of the summer. I’m not thinking of all the fun things that you do, like going on trips or vacations or camps. I’m thinking about how I am going to use that time to catch my son up in some way.
In fact, right after he was diagnosed at the age of two, before the summer would start, I would spend hours. In Lakeshore Learning, which if you have never heard of it, it’s like a teacher store where they have all kinds of workbooks and flashcards and all that type of thing. For kids, I would say primarily under the age of 10 or 12, I would go there for hours picking out activities.
I’d spend hours, laminating flashcards and other things for my. All in the hopes that during the summer months, I can make the most out of that time to catch him up on his reading skills, to do math drills, to do more types of therapy. My idea of the summer was an opportunity to load him up so that when he walked into the next school year, he would be on par with the neurotypical kids, or at least closer than he was.
I will tell you, neither of these things made me look forward to summer. So first of all, with the camps, there were two camps that my son could possibly go to. He couldn’t just go to like the regular YMCA camp. There was no way he would get lost so quickly in that I really needed to find programs that could give him a one-on-one or additional support because I knew he would need it in order to be successful.
And I was really lucky because I actually did have options. There was a JCC camp about an hour away that had a program called Open Hearts Open Doors, and they gave one-on-one aides to special needs kids, but the spaces were really limited, so I had to apply early. The same thing with the Kinney Center for Autism.
This was a camp that was created on St. Joe’s campus because St. Joe’s in Philadelphia has the Kinney Center and the Kinney Center are run by students of the program and other paraprofessionals that are experts in autism. And so this was also a fantastic camp for my son to get into. But the space was limited and there was a huge demand.
So every year I applied early and I crossed my fingers and I would get into one or other of the camps, and whichever camp Ben got into, I had to make it work. It didn’t matter that one camp was an hour in one direction and the other camp was an hour in the other. I had to figure it out and I did. And so I would either be getting him on the bus for one camp at 8:00 AM and then racing home from work to make sure I could get him off the bus at 4:00 PM.
Or I would be driving him 45 minutes from where I worked to drop him off at camp, drive back to work, and then I hired somebody who worked at the camp to drive Ben to my job in Center City, Philadelphia, where Ben would hang out with me for two or three hours while I still worked before going home. It was exhausting, but that was the way it is.
So I had to create my entire schedule around these camps and their schedules. But I was never guaranteed that Ben would get in. And even so, I was always afraid that one behavior would get him kicked out because these camps had long days and the kids are doing a lot. And when men gets overloaded, there is a chance that someone’s gonna get hit or pinched or kicked.
And I was always so afraid because if he got kicked out of one of those camps, my summer options were blown. So there was that piece of the summer that just caused me a lot of stress. And the other was my fear that my son would regress over the summer, that all of the gains he had made in his reading, his writing and his communication would just go out the door.
So I made it my job to make sure that didn’t happen. And so that’s where all of the drills and the flashcards and all the workbooks, that’s where all of that came in. And soon after summer began, I started introducing those to my son. And he actually did pretty well with it when he was like three or four years old.
But as he got older, he really started resisting and I think his. Day at school had gotten a lot harder for him. There was a lot more anxiety and he really did need that downtime, and he was seeing that his peers weren’t doing homework over the summer, so it really wrangled him that he would be doing homework over the summer.
And so it became more difficult as that happened. My anxiety was through the roof. Because I looked at this time as my responsibility to fill it up to make sure that he progressed or at least didn’t regress. And so when he resisted doing the activities, I lost my coal with him so many times to the point where we would do an activity for a couple of days and then there would be so much stress that was caused by it that we wouldn’t do it for the rest of the summer.
So all of these grand plans, all of these beautiful workbooks and flashcards got pushed to the side, and I would spend the rest of the summer with just this horrible feeling in my stomach that I was failing my son, even if he was having a great time, even if he was doing well in camp. I still lived with the fear and the guilt that I wasn’t making the most of the summer for him, and it really showed up in my parenting.
I didn’t enjoy the things we did as much as I could have, because I was always thinking that we should be doing something different. Every time I saw him on the iPad, I would freak out and wanna take it away from him and make him do something else, or make him play on an app that was more educational.
So there was always this push pull between the two of us of him wanting to do his own thing and chill out and have fun and play games, and me wanting to turn my living room into a classroom. I’m sharing this with all of you because at this time of the year, this is a big issue that I coach my clients on.
A lot of clients have fears of regression over the summer, and they also feel the pressure to keep their child engaged academically all summer so that they can either catch up or they can be on par for the next school year. Now, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with having academics be part of the summer.
In fact, I think it’s great. But I want you to check the thoughts and the emotions that you’re having around it. If your thought is, it’s not enough, or I need to catch him up, or my child might regress, that’s probably gonna create anxiety for you. And if that’s creating anxiety, one of two things will happen.
You will either be really dysregulated and really irritable as you tried to get your child to do the thing. Or you’ll do nothing. You will run and hide from it. You will avoid it all while feeling terrible about yourself. That’s what I did. So I was never showing up to my son as laid back and chill and, Hey, let’s do a couple sight words or do a Star Wars workbook math problem.
It was much more, it’s like, we have to do this, we have to do it now. We have to do it for a certain amount of time. He needs to get a certain percentage of these right before we move on. That energy was terrible because my son picked up on it and it really dysregulated him. And so then we were in this vicious cycle of dysregulating one another.
All because of my fear that my son would enter the next school year so far behind, or that he would regress. So if this is you, here’s the advice that I have, and here’s what has worked for me. You need to go into the summer picking very realistic goals for your child, make them less than what you think they should be.
For instance, if you ideally want them to read three chapter books over the summer, make the goal two, and if you get to three, that’s fantastic. If you want your child to practice sight words each week. Maybe do the same two each day for a few days and then move on to two more. So the point here is to pick small and achievable goals so that your child gets a win and you get a win too.
The most challenging part of doing this is managing your mind. ’cause your brain’s gonna jump up and say, it’s not enough. I’m not doing enough. I need to do more. This isn’t even worth it. Just notice when that’s happening because if those are the thoughts that you’re having, the result is you’re probably not going to do anything.
This is where you get to see the compounding effect of doing a little bit, but doing it consistently. So for me and Ben, this looked different depending on his age. So when he was younger and he was doing sight words, instead of quizzing him on 20 sight words a night, I would do one or two a day. And another thing that I did is that.
For all of his shows, I put on the closed captioning because he watched the same shows over and over. So by putting on the closed captioning, I thought that that would be a way that he could link some of the words written to the word said. And sure enough, he was able to do that. Not all the time, not consistently, but there were some words that he picked up a lot faster because he was seeing them on whatever show he was watching.
For things like workbooks, I would buy grade level workbooks at the beginning of the summer, and they had Star Wars ones, which were great. They really inspired my son. Instead of expecting him or wanting him to do the entire workbook, I picked out about five pages that I thought were the most important and that I really wanted him to do.
Same thing with chapter books. I let him pick out really tiny books so he could have wins. I also let him do the Who was Books because he loved them. Those were an interest to him. And those were also a chapter book. Wherever I could be flexible and include something that was of interest to him, I would do it.
I would even create little books and little stories about things that he liked or things that we joked about. It could be animals, it could be the Mario characters stories about his friends. He really liked those. The point there was to just to be engaging him with small things, but doing it consistently and doing it in a way that it didn’t feel like work for me or for him.
Now as he’s older, he’s a teenager. My focus during the summer is really relaxation because first of all, he’s a teenager and teenagers sleep a lot. There’s a lot going on in their bodies. I know that Ben is so much more emotionally taxed now he’s ever been. I know that I did not realize for years how much this kid was masking.
That masking work to some extent in elementary school, but it doesn’t anymore. The difference between where he is emotionally and socially and where his peers are, it’s like a canyon. He really has to work hard to engage in activities and stay regulated, and so now the focus is more on teaching him the ways that he can stay safe, he can stay regulated, and he can use his strategy.
So for you and planning your summer for your child, if you are bracing yourself for the summer, I want you to check in with the thoughts that you are thinking. Those thoughts are going to create stress and anxiety in your body, and that’s going to make it a lot harder for you to strategize and troubleshoot and plan.
I wanna remind you, you have gotten through every summer of your life and your child’s life. To this point. You will get through this, but I don’t want you to just get through it. I want you to be able to enjoy it, and I want you to be able to relax. But to do that, you’re going to have to think differently about the summer.
If you’re thinking about just getting through it, or you’re focusing on all of your fears of regression, this is going to show up in how you parent. It’s gonna show up in your energy, and it’s going to impact your kiddo. The best thing that you can do for yourself to make the most of summer for yourself and your kiddo is first to recognize the fear and the anxiety that might be coming up for you and validate yourself.
Know that it’s normal, but we don’t want that fear and anxiety running you and running your summer. That’s where the decision to create small and achievable goals for you and your kiddo comes in when you’re not putting tons of pressure on yourself and on your child for the summer to look a certain way.
You will get to enjoy the summer you are having versus the summer you think you should be having. Alright everyone. That is it for this week’s episode. I will talk to you next week. Thanks for listening to the Autism Mom Coach. If you are ready to apply the principles you are learning in these episodes to your life, it is time to schedule a consultation call with me.
