Build resilience in children by letting them face challenges, develop self-regulation skills, and practice overcoming adversity. Encourage autonomy and resilience through positive stress and learning moments.
“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.
- 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 show 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 (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. For example: let your child work to resolve a conflict with a friend, and sit with some hard feelings throughout the process. “Sometimes friendships are hard. This can happen, but we can recover. I believe that you’re going to learn from your argument with Lexi.”
- Focus on building self-regulation skills and staying physically active. Have your child play games to improve regulation (Simon Says, musical chairs, freeze dance), take a breath or count to 10 before responding when they are upset..
- 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 learning from challenges.