Hidden Struggles During the Holidays

For most of us, the holiday season is a time of joy and togetherness; a special time of year during which we surround ourselves with the comfort and warmth of our friends and families to enjoy festive traditions. But for children and families experiencing homelessness, maltreatment, or who are involved in the child welfare system, the holidays can feel starkly different.

For these children and their families, the holiday season can highlight feelings of instability, displacement, and isolation. Unfortunately, these feelings can often be exacerbated by the societal expectations of joy and togetherness during the holidays, deepening a sense of inadequacy and exclusion. Understanding how the season can heighten these difficulties is crucial to providing effective trauma-informed care and support.

What is Trauma-Informed Care

Trauma-informed care is an approach that recognizes the widespread impact of trauma on an individual's life and actively works to prevent re-traumatization. It involves understanding the signs and symptoms of trauma, such as heightened anxiety, withdrawal, or anger, while fostering an environment of trust, safety, and emotional support. Core elements of trauma-informed care include ensuring physical and emotional safety, providing choices and collaboration rather than imposing decisions, and empowering individuals by respecting their strengths, cultural background, personal experiences, and choices.

By incorporating these principles, we can help create spaces where families feel seen, validated, and supported. And, since the holidays can often intensify feelings of isolation or grief, trauma-informed strategies are particularly relevant because they help reduce stress, reaffirm dignity, and restore a sense of agency that these children and families often lack.

Some Families Struggle During the Holidays

While festive and joyous, the all-encompassing nature of the holiday season can often leave those experiencing homelessness, maltreatment, or those who are involved within the child welfare system feeling isolated and ‘left out.'

For parents, it can also bring along with it the added complexity that comes from their desire to provide a festive experience for their children, an experience which the reality of their situation makes increasingly difficult.

As our Center Director Alexis Vazquez puts it, "I think many families struggle to make the holiday season special for their children. They want to make sure that their children have the same experiences as other children and are not missing out... the adults in their lives struggle to live up to society's expectations of what the holidays should look like."

These heightened emotional challenges underscore the importance of a trauma-informed response. By acknowledging the deep and complex issues at play, we can engage with children and their families in a way that doesn't simply provide them with temporary relief but offers long-lasting support through which healing and a restored sense of control can be achieved.

The Holiday Store: Our Trauma-Informed Approach

Through our various initiatives at Children Today, we offer opportunities for the children and families in our care to feel safe, supported, and empowered. One such initiative is the Holiday Store. Through it, families receive toys, clothes, personal care products, and gift cards to grocery stores and big box retailers to help them meet their basic needs.  Families also experience moments of joy and togetherness in a supportive and welcoming environment.

" [During our Holiday Store] we allow families to choose what they want to give their children. Families know [what] their children enjoy or need. We know that parents are the ones who know their children best and should have the ability to choose what types of toys they like to play with," explains Alexis Vazquez.

She further illustrates the impact of this approach: "There is a look of joy and surprise on parents' face[s] when they realize that they are able to pick out gifts for [their] children. We have had several families tell us that the gifts that they pick out at the Holiday Store are the only gifts that they can give their children, and it gives them a sense of relief that [they] will have something to unwrap for Christmas."

This moment of relief captures the essence of what the Holiday Store offers: the chance for parents to affirm their roles as principal caregivers and for children to simply be children, even when facing immense difficulties.  By offering families choice and creating a supportive environment, we help those in our care feel a sense of normalcy and a connection with their community, which is essential for their healing. 

The impact of the Holiday Store isn’t just on families; it extends into our community. As our Executive Director, Elia Rocha, highlights, "Children Today has hosted the Holiday Store for 15 years. In that time, hundreds of families have relied on it not only to provide holiday gifts for their little ones but also to help them meet their basic needs during some very challenging seasons in their lives. But it's not just the families we serve that are positively impacted by the Holiday Store. For me, the Store demonstrates how we live in community with one another and how our neighbors and friends are looking for ways to support, to give back, and to uplift."
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This broader perspective underscores the importance of trauma-informed care and highlights how the Holiday Store is more than just a resource for gifts; it is also a reflection of the power of community and the collective healing that can be brought upon by supporting the most vulnerable members of our society.

How You Can Help

With our Holiday Store opening right around the corner, we invite you to join us this season. Whether that be through donating to support our initiatives, learning about our trauma-informed programs, or sharing our mission with others, your support can help brighten the holiday season for families in need.
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To learn more about Children Today, the Holiday Store, and how you can make a difference, visit us at Childrentoday.org.