Single Parent Christmas Loneliness: How to Beat the Holiday Blues Without a Partner

For lots of people, single parent Christmas loneliness is one of the main things they’re dreading about the holiday season. Quite often, social media and TV show us the image of a big, happy family spending Christmas together, and we can feel we don’t match up to that.

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We want you to have the festive season of your dreams, whether there’s a partner involved or not! Here, we’re going to break down some great tips for managing single parent Christmas loneliness when you’re in the middle of it, as well as advice on planning to prevent it.

Managing Single Parent Christmas Loneliness

• Emotional Well-being: Regularly checking in on your emotional well-being is the best way to ensure you take care of it. At regular intervals over the holiday season, ask yourself how you’re feeling, and make a note of it. If there’s anything that’s on your mind or upsetting you, take the time to do something about it or distract yourself from it. 
• Resilience Through Self-Care: Being a resilient person isn’t necessarily about being unflinching in the face of something tough and difficult to manage. Instead, it can be about having an emotional reaction to that thing, allowing yourself to feel, and then giving yourself grace while you get back on your feet. Taking the time to care for yourself as much as possible is a great way to get through the toughest moments of single parent Christmas loneliness.
• Accept That You’re Having a Tough Time: The best way to start getting through a tough situation is to acknowledge what’s happening around you. If you feel extremely lonely at Christmas, then that’s perfectly valid! Humans are social creatures, and the need for genuine connection often drives us. Lucy Dixon, writing for the Independent, shared her experience that “loneliness has been by far the hardest part of being a single mum.” From that realisation, you can make changes to help yourself out.
• Loneliness Can be a Spiral: After you spend a little while being lonely, it can start to push you down a spiral of negative thoughts. It can start to feel like you’re undeserving of social contact, with the proof being the lack of social contact around you. Of course, this isn’t true. Get out of that loneliness spiral as early as you can by reaching out to a friend or family member. Even a quick chat about the weather can make a world of difference.

Practical Planning to Prevent Loneliness

For many, the obvious response to feeling lonely is to simply go out of the house and do things. For single parents, it may not be that easy. If you’ve got a sleeping baby in the other room, you can’t just go out: you must be there to take care of the little one. So how can you approach loneliness practically?

• Think Up New Christmas Traditions: A good way to avoid any oncoming single parent Christmas loneliness is simply to think up new ways you can spend the holiday season. By distracting yourself and your kids with a walk to the park or a trip to see your parents, you’re moving your focus away from loneliness.
• Ask Kids What They Want to Do: As much as asking your kids what they want to do might sound like a bad idea (I can already see myself trying to explain why we can’t go to the moon), it can be surprisingly insightful. Kids are social butterflies full of energy, and allowing yourself to get scooped up by their inertia can be a great way to avoid feelings of loneliness.
• Invite Friends and Family Strategically: When lonely, it can feel like you want to spend twenty-four hours a day with people so that you feel less upset. However, you didn’t actually want that as much as your lonely brain thinks you do. To quell single parent Christmas loneliness without getting overwhelmed, invite people strategically. Aim to always have something to look forward to as well as something to want rest from.
• Make Arrangements With Your Ex Ahead of Time: Sharing your kids with your ex-partner over the holiday season can be painful. However, it allows both of you to experience some time with the little ones and some time in your own company. Use that to your advantage in the fight against single parent Christmas loneliness by arranging to see friends, walking, or doing errands on your own time. Single Parents on Holiday says this well on their site: “You might get out of cooking a roast for hours, or you will have time to clean up the mess left by your own celebrations with the kids, get some well-deserved sleep, and best of all: you get to relax and have some much-deserved time to yourself.”

No one should feel lonely at Christmas, and if they do, they shouldn’t let it get them down. We hope our article about avoiding and managing single parent Christmas loneliness has helped you plan ahead for your festive season!