Summer, Transition, and the Emotional Weight of Change for Families in Calabasas
Summer carries a particular emotional weight for families, one that is often obscured by its surface brightness. The end of the school year is a genuine transition, and transitions, even welcome ones, require adaptation. Routines that have organized daily life for nine months dissolve. Children and teenagers who have been held by the structure of school days and social calendars suddenly have expanses of unstructured time. Seniors who have just graduated are navigating the particular grief and excitement of a chapter ending. Parents are managing the logistics of summer while often carrying their own professional demands unchanged. And for many families, summer is when the tensions that have been kept below the surface by the busyness of the year have room to rise. As a family therapist in Calabasas and Hidden Hills, June is one of the times I most consistently hear from families who find themselves in need of support they did not quite expect to need.
Why Transition Is Hard Even When It Is Welcome
There is a human tendency to assume that good changes should be easy to adapt to. If a child is graduating, that is good. If a family is going on vacation, that is good. If the school year is over and the pressure lifts, that is good. And yet research on human adaptation consistently shows that change itself, independent of its valence, requires neurological and emotional adjustment. The nervous system that has organized itself around a particular set of routines and demands does not simply click over to a new configuration. It has to recalibrate. And during that recalibration period, people often experience irritability, anxiety, or low mood that does not seem proportionate to circumstances that are objectively fine.
Understanding this can reduce a great deal of unnecessary confusion and self-criticism. You are not failing at summer. You are adjusting, and adjustment takes time and energy.
Teenagers and the Summer Identity Question
For teenagers, summer removes the primary social structure through which they have been organizing their identity and their relationships. School provides belonging, daily purpose, and the peer contact that is developmentally central to adolescence. Without it, many teenagers experience a kind of drifting that can shade into anxiety or depression. The teenager who seemed fine all year may become noticeably irritable or withdrawn in June, not because something has gone wrong but because the scaffolding they rely on has temporarily come down.
This is particularly true for teenagers who have been managing anxiety, depression, or social difficulty during the school year. The school year provides external structure that compensates for the internal structure that anxiety or depression disrupts. Summer removes that compensation, and the underlying difficulty becomes more visible. If your teenager struggles significantly every summer, this pattern is worth addressing therapeutically rather than simply waiting it out.
Making Space for Genuine Rest
One of the things I find myself saying most often to families at the beginning of summer is this: genuine rest is not the same thing as the absence of activity. For people, and particularly for people who manage anxiety or depression, unstructured empty time is often not restful at all. It is an opportunity for worry, rumination, and the difficult thoughts that the busyness of the school year has been keeping at bay. Genuine rest involves a different quality of presence: activities that absorb attention in a pleasant way, time in nature, creative engagement, connection with people who feel safe. Building some deliberate structure into the summer, even loose and flexible structure, is not a failure of rest. It is an act of self-care and family care.
If your family is navigating a difficult summer, or if you want support before the difficulty arrives, this is exactly the time to reach out. Transitions are often more workable when they are engaged with proactively rather than reactively.
Susie Cole Rome, MA, LMFT, is a licensed marriage and family therapist with over forty years of experience providing therapy for individuals, couples, and families in Hidden Hills, Calabasas, and across the Greater Los Angeles area, in person and via secure telehealth for California residents.
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Susie Cole Rome, MA, LMFT, offers compassionate therapy for individuals, couples, and families in Hidden Hills, Calabasas, Woodland Hills, Malibu, Agoura Hills, and throughout the Greater Los Angeles area, with secure telehealth available for all California residents.
📞 (818) 618-4762
✉️ Susie@susierome.com
📍 24933 Kit Carson Rd, Hidden Hills, CA 91302
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