Winter Break and the Stuff No One at School Talks About

Winter break is here.  

Two weeks off. No schedule. No homework. No school emails staring you down at 9:42 p.m.  

If you’re parenting a child with an IEP or any child for that matter, you’re probably in one of two camps right now:  

- “Thank God, we can rest.”  

- “Oh Lawd, they’re home. All day. For two weeks.”  

Both are valid. Both are real. And both can exist in the same body on the same day.  

I’m Katie, special education family advocate and former special education teacher here in Virginia. My work through The Connected Student is all about helping families understand what their kids actually need and getting them the school support they need. I’m not here to make you turn winter break into a data-collection boot camp. I want you to actually enjoy your kid.  

Because real connection, the kind where your child feels safe, seen, and supported, matters more than any progress report. And here’s the twist: those quiet, connected, messy, real-life moments at home? They can tell you things about your child that school will never see or document. Not with clipboards. Not with charts. Just with your curiosity.  

Below are six things to notice over winter break, not to measure, not to fix, just to see. 

1. What Happens When School Stops?

Here’s the truth almost no one at school will say out loud: school is built to compensate. It’s designed so your child can lean on supports, visual cues, predictable routines, peer models, constant adult prompting, carefully scaffolded tasks. That structure helps them function, and that’s good. But it can also hide how hard they’re actually working just to keep up.  

When that structure suddenly disappears over break, what you’re seeing at home isn’t “bad behavior” or “regression.” You’re seeing what life looks like without all those built-in supports propping everything up. That 3 p.m. meltdown over the “wrong” fork? That total emotional collapse after a simple request? That might be your child’s nervous system finally telling the truth about how overloaded it’s been.  

On the flip side, that deep calm you see after two days off,  when your child’s shoulders drop, the dark circles under their eyes fade, and they suddenly have more patience? That’s also information. It might be telling you that school is asking more of their brain and body than anyone realizes. Both the hard and the calm are data points… but over winter break its not your job to analyze your child. It’s to breathe and be present. 

Before you keep reading, quick heads-up—if you’re thinking, “I don’t have the bandwidth to remember all of this,” I’ve got you.

I put together a free resource you can download and keep handy:

Winter Break Observation Guide: 6 Things to Notice.

It’s not a checklist and it’s not homework.

It’s a simple guide to help you notice patterns over break without turning family time into data collection.

You can download it below and come back to this post whenever you need.

2. How Everyone’s Nervous System Is Really Doing

Let’s be honest: winter break is not just a kid thing. It hits the whole house.  

Suddenly, you’re the teacher, the schedule, the sensory support, the snack bar, and the social filter — all in one body. The routine you rely on gets scrambled. Your own nervous system gets yanked around by noise, mess, sugar, and the constant “Mom? Dad? Can I…?” And when everybody’s nervous system is running hot, that is not the moment to “fix your child.”  

Winter break is not a test you have to pass. It’s a window into how your family functions without the scaffolding of school. Notice:  

- Does your child seem more dysregulated without structure, or more relaxed?  

- Do you feel more connected… or more like roommates in survival mode?  

That information matters. But some days, the most regulated thing you can do is: go for a walk, watch the same movie again, let them stim, let yourself hide in the bathroom for five minutes. Release expectations. That’s not failure; that’s nervous-system triage.  

3. What They Avoid (and What They Seek Out)

Here’s where you become a quiet detective, not a judge.  

If your child spends the entire break avoiding anything that looks or smells like reading? Notice that. If you suggest a quick game that involves writing and they suddenly “need a snack,” “have to pee,” or find 47 other ways out? That’s information about effort, frustration, and maybe skill gaps, not laziness.  

If they:  

- Refuse to read but happily listen to you read aloud or audiobooks 

- Melt down when asked to write a sentence but can tell elaborate, detailed stories out loud.  

- Seem calmer when they build with LEGOs for an hour but unravel after 10 minutes of a worksheet-style activity.  

Those patterns are trying to tell you something about how their brain takes in, processes, and expresses information. You don’t have to correct it over break. You don’t have to “push through” or create your own homemade reading intervention. You just have to see the pattern clearly enough to talk about it later.  

 4. How They Handle Transitions Without School’s Structure

Schools are full of invisible supports: bells, timers, teachers narrating transitions, visual schedules on the board, peer cues like “everyone’s lining up now.” At home, those supports often disappear… and that’s when you get the raw version of how your child handles change.  

Pay attention to:  

- How do they handle shifting from screen time to dinner?  

- Do they need multiple warnings before transitions?  

- Do visual supports (written list, simple picture schedule, a sticky note) make transitions easier, or do they still struggle?  

If break exposes that transitions are brutal without heavy adult scaffolding, that’s not a parenting fail. It might be a sign your child needs more explicit transition supports built into the school day: visual schedules, previewing changes, transition countdowns, or sensory breaks before and after big shifts. You don’t need to “fix” this over break; you just need to know it’s real.  

5. What Connection Does to Their Behavior

This one gets skipped a lot in IEP land: connection is data, too.  

When your child:  

- Seeks you out after something hard instead of shutting down.  

- Softens after a 10-minute snuggle, car ride chat, or silly game.  

- Can hold it together better after movement, play, or one-on-one time.  

That’s not just “nice family time.” That’s information about what regulates them and what helps them access higher-level skills. Behavior is information, not misbehavior. Avoidance tells a story. So does joy. So does that glazed look of pure exhaustion.  

Winter break strips away some of the noise: no morning rush, no cafeteria chaos, no constant comparison to peers. What’s left is the story of what actually helps your child feel safe enough to learn. Those little “Huh, that’s interesting” moments at home often become the most powerful evidence you bring to request testing or into an IEP meeting, especially when the school team says, “We don’t see that here.”  

6. How You Want to Use This in January (Later, Not Now)

Here’s the part that matters: you don’t have to do anything with this information during break. Right now, just live it.  

But when January rolls around and you’re back in IEP land or you’re thinking about asking the school for more support, you can come back to what you noticed and turn it into language schools understand:  

- “Over winter break, my child completely avoided reading unless someone read to them. That makes me wonder if decoding is still very effortful.”  

- “Transitions at home were extremely difficult without lots of warnings and visuals. I’d like to talk about adding more explicit transition supports to the IEP.”  

- “My child regulated best when they had movement throughout the day. How can we build more movement or sensory breaks into her school routine?”  

None of this has to be confrontational. You’re not accusing the school of doing everything wrong. You’re saying, “Here’s what’s true for my child in the real world,  how can we reflect that in the IEP?” That’s the work. That’s what I help families do: not pick fights, but hold everyone, lovingly and firmly, accountable to what the student actually needs.  

What to Do Next (After You Rest)

So as winter break rolls in, take the pressure way down. You don’t need Pinterest-level activities. You don’t need a color-coded schedule on the fridge unless it genuinely helps. You don’t need to engineer perfection.  

You just need to be present enough to notice the small stuff: the avoidance, the joy, the meltdowns, the softness after connection, the ways your child comes back to you when the world feels too big. Enjoy your kid. Laugh. Rest. Let things fall apart a little, that’s often where the truth shows up.  

And if, after break, you’re sitting there wondering, “Does any of this even count?”; yes, it does. Those lived moments are often more honest than any standardized assessment.  

You also don’t have to make sense of it alone. If you’d like help turning what you saw over winter break into something concrete and usable to present to your child’s school,  you can email me at hello@theconnectedstudent.com to set up a free 20-minute call. Together, we can turn those quiet, real-life moments into the kind of data that actually moves the needle for your child.