Help your teen build resilience by embracing challenges, learning from mistakes, and fostering autonomy. Support growth through adversity with empathy and guidance.
“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 form it into something that works.
- Adolescence is an important time to think about resilience:
- Mistakes can and will happen
- Opportunities for failure are still mostly safe
- More opportunities for adolescents to test skills
- Sustain for adulthood
- Adolescent brain open to learning
- We need to experience adversity to develop resilience. This requires that parents allow their children to experience manageable distress and/or hardships.
What to Try:
- Let your tween or teen experience positive stress (instead of rescuing, distracting, or “fixing” hard feelings). Work through these feelings together. For example: if your child does badly on a test, let them work through the feelings and solutions for the future. “I know you are feeling disappointed. I’ve been there. Take some time to think about a plan and figure out what to do next, and I’m here to talk about it with you when you’re ready. You know how to do this.”
- Let your child see you struggle and talk about those struggles too. 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.
- Although hard, don’t prevent your child from experiencing problems or hardships. For example, if there is drama among their friends, help your child to navigate issues with your support, not with your interference.
- 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 strong family traditions as an anchor. Resilient children often have sources of faith and hope they can draw from in hard times.