“Although the world is full of suffering, it is also full of overcoming it.” - Helen Keller
Key Concepts:
- Resilience: the ability or capacity of a system to endure change AND turn it into something that works.
- Resilient children tend to believe that they are the captain of their destiny and that THEY (not the events around them) control their fate.
- We need to experience adversity to develop resilience. This requires that parents allow their child to experience manageable distress and/or hardships. Children need to practice handling stress by flexing those muscles while they are safely in your care.
- The research shows that being able to tolerate the highs and lows of life (without a dramatic reaction in the body) increases resilience.
What to Try:
- Let your child experience positive stress (instead of rescuing, distracting, or “fixing” hard feelings). Work through these feelings together.
- “Sometimes friendships are hard. You've had other times like this before, and you got through it."
- Let your child see you struggle. Experiencing failure is an important part of being human.
- When you have a hard time accomplishing something, share with your child. Allowing them to see that success doesn’t always come easily is an important part of building resilience.
- Don't rescue. For example, if your child has to turn in a poster project for school and they aren’t finished in time, let them learn from this experience.
- Make sure to praise your child’s effort and connect it to the outcome. For example, “Your writing has improved so much. You've been working really hard on building your stamina and planning in advance.” This will lead to less praise that sounds like “You’re amazing at this!” or “You're such a good soccer player.”
- Encourage autonomy and a sense of control for your child. Allow your children to do for themselves what they can do, give enough help for them to do the things they can almost do, and model for them the things they cannot yet do.
- Create a family bounceback statement like “when we get knocked down, we get up and try again.” Repeat it often and help your child to internalize the message around handling challenges.