Resilience is a new buzzword.
What does it mean and why is it so important for our children?
Resilience is a skill set that helps us bounce back from adverse events that take place in our lives.
If this is hard for adults, how much harder could be for young children?
This post is a great guide for parents, who want to cultivate this crucial skill in their kids.
As many other skills, building resilience takes time, but it’s much easier to develop it if you start early.
Therefore, it is important for parents and carers to know how to promote resilience in early years.
What is resilience?
Resilience is the skill of adapting well to difficult situations and thriving despite the challenges.
It requires a set of life skills, such as:
- Self-regulation
- Optimism
- Sense of humour
- Patience
- Persistence
- Problem-solving
- Adaptability
Nowadays resilience is a buzzword. The last decades parents thought that accommodating all children’s needs would be beneficial for them. Nevertheless, parental over-accommodation can be related to poorer child emotional and psychological well-being and low resilience. Solving every minor problem and disappointment or avoiding, predicting and preventing problems for your child does not contribute to fostering resilience. It is important to give your child the chance to overcome small challenges when they are young in order to build their resilience for bigger setbacks in the future. Children can work things out for themselves, when they go through uncomfortable feelings. Setbacks, failures and stress are part of our lives and if we want to raise healthy leaders, we need to ensure they develop resilience early.
How to test your child’s resilience levels?
- How does your child react, when his/her block construction is destroyed?
- What does your child do, when another child takes a toy away?
- How does your child react to changes in the routine?
- Would your child be mad, if you would refuse to buy a toy that he/she requested at a shop? If yes, for how long?
- How does your child deal with situations that cause disappointment, frustration and anger?
We can all imagine that children might not react well to difficult -for them- situations like the above. It is actually quite normal to overreact and not be able to regulate their big emotions. This is exactly when they need support from grown ups in order to learn how to self-regulate and build resilience.
“The good news is that resilience skills can be learned” according to American Psychological Association.
How to promote resilience in early years?
- Be a role model dealing with tough times and setbacks.
- Help you child identify and manage strong emotions.
- Praise your child for trying, for example say ‘Well done for giving it another go’.
- Let your child deal with small challenges.
- Recognise and acknowledge when things go well.
- Boost your child’s confidence. Give your child responsibilities and let him/her lead!
- Support your child’s development of problem-solving skills.
- Encourage risky play.
- Encourage new activities and experiences.
This post was all about resilience in children.
You read what is resilience and how you can promote resilience in early years.
We can not predict or prevent all adverse events in our children’s life.
However, we can equip children with crucial skills from a young age, so they will develop them over time.
Resilient kids are more successful as they keep working on their goals despite the challenges.
Let’s help our children become successful leaders!
