Social burnout is a feeling of fatigue and being overwhelmed by your interactions with people. It can cause irritability and tendencies to shut down and isolate.
How to Know If Your Child Is Suffering from Social Burnout
Author Jennifer B. Wallace, who wrote “Never Enough: When Achievement Culture Becomes Toxic–and What We Can Do About It,” said we all need to be getting our PhDs in our children.
It simply means we must study our children’s wiring and teach them how they’re wired. Learning whether they get pumped up by groups of people or feel drained by them is essential, but it goes deeper than that.
Social burnout can also occur when our students’ need for downtime is ignored. Maybe you have an extrovert who thrives on interaction with friends and genuinely loves being around people. But if his or her need for time to process falls by the wayside of after-school activities, weekend birthday parties, and homework, you could see signs of a different child.
Recognizing social burnout will be individual to your child, but it usually includes some of these symptoms.
- They lose interest in conversations they may typically take an interest in.
- They become irritable for no reason.
- They get easily overwhelmed by something small that ordinarily wouldn’t overwhelm them.
- They aren’t as excited about hobbies and pursuits that bring them joy.
3 Ways to Avoid Social Burnout
If you start to recognize signs of social burnout in your child, a good first move is to look at the obvious: your schedule. Ask yourself some of these questions:
- Have we encountered multiple interruptions to our everyday rhythms and routines lately?
- Has our schedule changed in significant ways (such as a shift in workplace or school hours, or the addition of an after-school activity)?
- Does my child always show signals of burnout or only after specific types of gatherings?
- Are there other possible sources of your child’s feelings or exhaustion?
- Have we been going from one thing to the next or traveling frequently?
1. Assess your schedule.
As you assess your schedule, that may lead to information you can use for the future. Try out fewer trips, or perhaps lengthen the time between your trips if possible. Other ideas include scheduling only one birthday party per month to see how your child does with a slower schedule.
2. Prioritize and set limits.
When you refine your schedule, you’ll be able to see a month at a glance. Look at what fills your time and what fills your child’s time. If they’re young and need to go with you on errands, consider even those car trips, which can tire a child out. Prioritize how you want to spend your social time with necessities such as grocery shopping and errands.
If you notice, for example, that your child attends the birthday party of every classmate, try setting a limit. Let him choose his four best friends from the class and attend those parties throughout the school year. He can always see the other students after school at an extracurricular activity, but limiting how he recharges each weekend is important.
You can even set limits as a family. Some families decide they’re only going to allow each child one extracurricular activity at a time. This may mean that your soccer-loving child has to take a backseat to playing in a year-long travel league during the season when your oldest daughter competes as a gymnast. Making sure the family limits allow margin for everyone in the family is crucial to avoiding social burnout.
3. Pay attention to seasonal shifts.
It’s just as easy for adults to suffer from social burnout during seasons of change. If you have a big move coming up, you probably naturally start declining invitations from friends to go out to eat so that you can spend time packing and getting organized.
Think of the same thing with your child and new seasons. As you gear up for Christmas, for example, take stock of which events are worth it to you and your child and which ones you can agree to skip.
Pay attention to shifts in your child’s developmental season, too. Sometimes, she naturally needs more sleep because she’s growing into a teenager. Look for those shifts and try to anticipate them whenever possible. A child’s development has a tremendous impact on how they process social interaction and schedule overload.
Or you may notice that she’s had a greater school homework load than usual, and it may be time to pair back on social commitments until you can assess how she’s doing with the extra work.
Overall, students need help all along the way to minimize what drains them and give more attention to what fuels them. They need social output just as much as the rest of us, but their internal wiring can play a huge role in their social sensibilities and how they respond to external events. A few factors to account for are whether your child is an introvert or an extrovert, what their personality type says about them, and how their birth order impacts their tendencies.
As your child ages (middle and high school), you can teach him these concepts, too. It will help him pay attention and practice life skills such as time management.
If you’ve considered these tips and your child is still struggling, it may be time to consider a different type of school. Learnwell’s hybrid school operates on a two-day basis. Students attend school two days a week and work at home the other two days a week with a parent, grandparent, or tutor. The fifth day is used for field trips, extracurricular activities, and flex time to work on long-term projects as needed.
Join us at our next Discover Learnwell event to find out if Learnwell North Georgia is a good fit for you. If you’ve ever considered homeschooling 100%, you may be overwhelmed by the idea. The Learnwell Navigator Program guides you step by step if homeschooling fits your family’s needs well.