10 ways to Build Resilience
The world is a frightening place right now and our children are experiencing all the anxieties and challenges we are. Reports show that Covid has clearly had a negative impact on the mental health across all ages. But even without covid, it’s impossible to protect our children from the ups and downs of life. We can however help them develop the skills to successfully navigate them. By this I am referring to resilience.
What is resilience?
Resilience is the ability to recover from negative experiences. A simple example is learning how to ride a bike. When our children first try they fall over many times and may even hurt themselves but if they take on the risk and don’t give up, they are soon racing around! Other examples of resilience is coping with bullying, grief or divorce.
So if your child is resilient they have the skills to cope with stress and adversity, and to also learn from it. I like the term ‘bounce forward’ which to me implies that resilient kids don’t just bounce back but they learn and move forward in how they manage situations.
The good news is that resilience is a learned behaviour. This means that as parents we can help our children to become more resilient. What a wonderful thing to teach them and I know that as a parent it’s high up on my priorities!
How to teach resilience?
There are many schools of thought and recommendations that I’ve encountered. I’ve compiled what I feel are the essential tools into a list that’s easy to implement:
- Love. This refers to the importance of a stable loving relationship with an adult – like you 🙂 So if you’re reading this blog, you’ve already achieved it. But to be more specific it’s about being warm, supportive and providing consistent rules in a loving way. Children then feel safe and secure and are able to explore the world around them.
- Empathy. This is about teaching children to acknowledge the feelings and struggles of other people. Help your child to see themselves as caring and also as a part of a community where they can make an impact. Charity is a wonderful way to do this and I think donating time to help others is especially powerful.
- Independence. We should allow our children to try new or difficult things without us overtaking or shielding them. This encourages self esteem. For example, let your toddler try to zip up their jacket when you’re rushing out the house don’t overtake and do it yourself. It also means supporting them to try something that they may find scary e.g. riding a bike on their own for the first time. It goes without saying that you should never let them try something dangerous or that is beyond their developmental capacity.
- Identify strengths. By letting children try to do things on their own we are able to then identify their strengths and encourage them e.g. “Well done you zipped up your own jacket, you’re so grown up!”. This builds confidence and self esteem, qualities that help build resilience.
- Do overs. Mistakes are okay and can be a great learning tool. When your child makes a mistake, don’t get upset or focus on the mistake but rather try problem solve together and encourage another attempt. “Oh dear, zipping up your jacket is tricky is there something that you think could make it easier?”.
- Let them be who they are. As a mum, I always try to remind myself to support my girls to become the best version of who they are not who I think they should be. This also builds self esteem. We should never push our children in a direction they don’t want to go.
- Encourage responsibility. Children should feel like a participating and important member of their family and community. I think that a great way to implement this is to allocate age appropriate chores like making their bed, setting the table or helping care for a pet.
- Model the behaviour. Yes, we are still the best teachers and our children will model our behaviour so try to teach problem solving and reslience by expressing it yourself. Remember that we aren’t always in control of what happens in our life but we are in control with our response to it.
- Healthy eating. Yes, this is always included in any recommendations I give and that’s for good reason. When we eat healthy foods we fuel our brains and bodies to function optimally. I won’t go into details today but you should focus on your children avoiding junk and rather eating healthy colourful foods.
- Exercise. Keeping active is an evidence backed tool to support mental health of all ages. I find that a quick game of running tag or even dancing to a pop song is a great way to lift mood. This helps our children learn how to self regulate their emotions which again helps to build resilience.
It’s a parent’s instinct to want to protect our children, but the reality is that we can’t and shouldn’t do this all the time. We need to support and guide our children to learn the skills to cope with adversity and to be resilient.
I hope you found this helpful and that you feel better equipped to help your child cope with the stresses and challenges that life presents. I think that it’s a particularly tricky time right now and really important to be aware of our children’s mental health. If you’d like to read more about anxiety and communicating with your child please read this blog here. But, as always, if you’re worried about your child please speak with your healthcare provider.
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