Why Is My Child So Different in the Holidays?

It is one of the questions I hear most often once the summer holidays begin, usually asked with a mixture of relief and confusion in the same breath. "He's like a different child." "She's so much calmer without school." Or, just as commonly, the opposite: "I don't understand it, we've got no pressure on her at all, and she's melting down more than she ever does in term time." Both versions of that sentence land in my inbox every August, and both make complete sense once you understand what is actually driving them.

Parents often assume one of these patterns must be the "normal" one and the other a sign that something is wrong. In my experience, neither is unusual. What changes over the holidays is not your child's character. It is the load on their nervous system, and how much effort that system has been spending, often invisibly, to hold everything together during term time.

When the holidays bring relief

Many of the children I see are working extremely hard just to get through an ordinary school day. Sitting still for long stretches, processing instructions over background noise, managing transitions between lessons, coping with the social demands of the playground, all of this asks a great deal of a nervous system that has not yet finished developing the foundations it needs. For a child with retained primitive reflexes, that effort is even greater, because reflexes that should have been replaced by mature, automatic control in infancy are still firing in the background, using up capacity that should be free for learning and regulation.

Take that structured, demanding environment away, and it is little wonder some children visibly soften. The holidays remove the noise, the timetable, the constant low-level vigilance of a busy classroom. What you are often seeing is not a happier child so much as a less exhausted one.

When the holidays bring the opposite

For other families, removing school structure does not bring relief at all, it removes the scaffolding a child was quietly relying on. Some children, particularly those with a retained Moro reflex, or fight and flight reflex, find unpredictability itself unsettling. A school day, for all its demands, is also predictable. The same routine, the same expectations, the same clear boundaries, often with a visual timetable which allows them to mentally prepare for the next event, every day. Take that structure away and replace it with the looser rhythm of a holiday, and a nervous system that depends on predictability to feel safe can start to struggle rather than relax.

There is also the question of masking. Many children, especially those who are older or who have some awareness of being "watched," spend the school day holding themselves together in front of teachers and classmates. That takes enormous effort, and it has to be paid for somewhere. Often, it is paid for at home, at the end of the day or across the length of the holidays, once the audience has gone and it finally feels safe enough to let go.

Why this so often comes back to reflexes

Whichever pattern you recognise in your own child, both point to the same underlying question, how much spare capacity does their nervous system actually have, and what is it spending that capacity on. Retained primitive reflexes are arguably one of the most common, and most overlooked, answers. A retained Moro reflex keeps the nervous system primed for threat, which affects how a child copes with both unpredictability and sensory overload. Retained Tonic Labyrinthine and Symmetrical Tonic Neck Reflexes affect posture, balance, and the physical effort of simply sitting or moving through the day, effort that adds up without anyone noticing why a child seems so tired by three o'clock, or so unsettled by seven.

None of this is about behaviour in the way it is often framed. It is not naughtiness, and it is not simply "holiday overtiredness" either, although tiredness is very often part of it. It is a nervous system telling you, as clearly as it knows how, where it is under strain.

What the holidays can show you

I sometimes describe the school holidays as a kind of natural test, one you did not have to design yourself. If your child relaxes the moment structure is removed, that is useful information about how much of their term-time behaviour is effortful compliance rather than genuine ease. If your child struggles more without structure, that tells you something equally useful about how much they depend on external scaffolding to stay regulated, and what might happen as demands increase through school, particularly at times of transition such as a new school year, a house move, or starting secondary school.

Either way, the holidays are not simply something to get through until term starts again. They are a window into what your child's nervous system is carrying, and a good moment to look properly at whether there is more support available than "wait and see."

Where an INPP assessment fits

This is exactly the kind of pattern a full INPP neurodevelopmental assessment is designed to investigate. Rather than guessing at causes, we look directly at which primitive reflexes remain active, and how they appear to be showing up in your child's daily life, whether that is the summer meltdowns, the term-time exhaustion, or both. From there, we build a daily home movement programme, reviewed regularly, to support the nervous system in finishing the developmental work it did not complete in infancy. For some children, Tomatis sound therapy alongside reflex integration adds a further layer of support, particularly where sensory sensitivity or auditory processing is part of the picture.

The school holidays will not last forever, and neither should the pattern you are seeing repeat itself, summer after summer, without anyone looking underneath it.