Building Resilience: How to Help Kids Face Difficulties that Count
Every parent’s job is to protect their child. We need to make sure our kids are safe and healthy. However, protecting children from all negative experiences is not only impossible, it will actually take away from their chance to develop resilience. Resilience is the ability to recover or bounce back from challenges, disappointment, or failures. Inevitably, all kids will experience adversity in their lives. Now imagine how difficult it would be to face your fears and vulnerabilities when you need to, if you’ve never been given the chance to try. This doesn’t mean that kids are left to their own devices at all times. Rather, it means that we need to help our kids learn to tolerate the uncomfortable and continue to move forward anyway. Yes, they will learn helpful skills along the way like sharing, leadership, and how to use their words. More importantly, with every small challenge, they will learn that they can persevere through the tough stuff that life will throw at them!
What is the benefit of building resilience?
Kids who are resilient are more likely to take healthy risks. They are not fearful of failing and tend to push themselves outside of their comfort zones. Resiliency also helps to protect us from stressful times because we have the experience of coming back from adversity. Kids will get sick, encounter malicious peers, struggle academically, and experience loss. By building resilience, kids can see that these are tolerable, temporary challenges.
As parents, how do we build resilience in our kids?
Model Resilience
Don’t be afraid to tell your child when you had a difficult experience. Show them how you coped with stress by using breathing techniques, acknowledging your feelings, and problem solving. Point out the positives of the stressful situation, even if the positive is only it being a learning experience. You can even let them help you solve the problem.
If you accidentally forget to run the dishwasher, tell them: “I forgot to run the dishwasher, which means there’s so many more dishes to clean. I’m frustrated, but I can either run it twice or wash the rest of the dishes in the sink by hand. What do you think I should do to solve this problem?”Encourage Mistakes
Mistakes help kids to learn. As adults, we can often show our kids the “better” way to solve a problem and it can be difficult to hold back when you want to intervene. By allowing kids to make a mistake on their own, we show that we trust our kids to solve problems on their own. In experiencing their own mistakes, they internalize how to change their behavior in the future in a more meaningful way.
If your child is checking in with you about a solution, tell them: “I’m not sure how it will work. Looks like you’re trying to figure it out and I can’t wait to see what you come up with.”Promote Positive Thinking
Resiliency is about taking the good and the bad together. Often, when we’re stressed, we forget about the good. Helping your child to reframe their thoughts into more positive thinking will help them to move on from seemingly negative situations. Always remember to validate first, so you do not discount their emotional experience.
If your child drops their ice cream cone on the pavement, tell them: “Dropping your ice cream is disappointing. The good thing is, we have more at home and I can help you scoop some more after we pick your sister up from the bus stop.”Allow Risk Taking (Safely, Of Course!)
In order to build resilience, kids need to experience situations that are disappointing, scary, or frustrating. Encourage your child to take risks in small ways, so that when they are faced with a bigger risk, which may be out of your control, they have some resilient experiences already in their toolbox.
If your child is worried about joining the basketball team, tell them: “I think it would be great to try out a new sport. We won’t know if you like it unless you try and I bet there will be a bunch of other kids on the team that are trying it for the first time too. Everyone feels a little nervous when they try something new.”
Building resilience in kids means pushing yourself outside of your comfort zone too. How will you encourage your child to build resilience today?
