16 Ways to Build Your Child's Resilience

Resilience Helps Us Bounce Back

and Spring Forward

The past seven months have challenged us on many levels and successfully navigating the stresses and strains of life s is more important now than ever. One of the most important skills needed for this is resilience.

We define resilience as the ability to recover from adversity and return to the level of functioning at which you were before the adverse event occurred.  It also means learning from the experience and using what you’ve learned to face the next challenge.  Resilience is the skill that enables us to bounce back and spring forward.

If we define resilience as the ability to face adversity, how do we define adversity? We classify adversity as either a serious hardship that is out of the ordinary (loss of a job, a failed relationship, a significant health problem) or ordinary low-level stress (strained relationship with family a member, pressure at work).  

Although we can’t control what happens to us, we can control how we respond to it.

When children have certain life experiences or when certain factors are in place, they are likely to develop resilience. These positive experiences include family and individual factors.

Factors That Provide Fertile Ground for Resilience

Family factors and individual factors play a role in a child’s ability to bounce back from adversity. Family factors include good-enough parenting, sound parental mental health, low family stress, and secure attachment. 

Individual factors include emotional regulation skills, self-esteem, empathy, flexibility, perseverance, social skills, self-control, sense of humor, positive beliefs about the future, talents and/or hobbies, and a strong cultural/religious identity. 

Secure Attachment

The most common factor among resilient people is having a close relationship with at least one parent. Being an attuned and responsive parent, fostering secure attachment, holding your children accountable by setting age-appropriate expectations, modeling coping skills, and promoting healthy communication are characteristics of good parenting that vivifies resilience.

Focusing on an ordinary childhood hardship and helping your child navigate their way through it provides them with practice, makes them feel supported, and reinforces the idea that they have agency over themselves.  

Your Resilience Training Guide

1.Expose your children to challenges but avoid the sink-or-swim approach. Children learn through experiencing both success and failure. Meeting failure is only valuable if they have a good chance of eventually achieving success. If they have no chance of succeeding, then failure can make things worse. When they achieve success after repeated attempts, ask them what they enjoyed about the experience, and what they learned about themselves.

2. Offer guidance, but give your children enough space to experiment with their own solutions .When your child has a problem, don’t jump in to save them. Your children need your support, but they also need to learn how to solve their own problems. Feeling frustrated is uncomfortable, but it can lead to a positive outcome.

3. Read age-appropriate stories to your children about people who showed resilience and discuss the concept with them. History is replete with stories of resilient figures. When reading these stories to your children, explain resilience to them and discuss how the hero of the story displayed this quality.

4. Coach your children as they face those every-day setbacks. Help them face the consequences and teach them how to use the setback as a point of reference. Consequences, although unpleasant, can serve as motivation to do things differently next time. Help them recall a time when they faced adversity, coped with it, and moved on. Pinpoint which strengths they used in their approach and what approach they might use now.

5. Encourage your children. The way you speak to your children becomes their inner voice.  When children face adversity, they draw upon past experiences and the messages they received. We want to convey positive and constructive messages, not harsh or critical ones.

6. Suggest that your children have a conversation with someone in the family who successfully faced adversity. That person could be you. Hearing about a challenge firsthand, the fears or worries associated with it, and what helped you overcome adversity illustrates the power of resilience in a personal way. 

7. Teach delayed gratification. Knowing that you can’t always have what you want when you want it, builds resilience. For example, playing board games with your children allows them to practice impulse control, turn-taking, and being a good loser.

8. Invite them to seek help. Adversity is more easily overcome when you feel supported by others. Help them identify situations that might require support, who their support system would be and how they can tap into it.

9. Allow free expression of feelings. Children are likely to become frustrated or angry when faced with a challenge. Listen to their feelings and provide empathy. “It’s so hard to get this done. You keep trying and having to start over again. I’m sorry this is so hard for you.”

10. Provide practice. Discuss situations that require your child to overcome adversity. Children have their own experiences to draw upon and can provide an imaginary situation. Your child might suggest practicing how to cope when being left out of a game during recess because a certain child who wields control over the group decided to exclude them.

11. Practice gratitude and indirectly prod your children to identify things they are grateful for. Asking what went right in their day or what someone did for them today that made them happy are both questions that train them to think about feeling grateful.

12. Reframe thoughts. This is not merely looking at the bright side. Use the reframe to convert the perceived failure into something more than just a failure. Reframing an experience allows you to extract something from it that you can use in the future.

13. Model behavior. Children learn by example. When parents frame their own challenges in a positive way, children learn to do the same.

14. Volunteer. Like all of us, children realize their power is limited. Helping others reminds us we can have a positive impact on others who face adversity.

15. Prompt your children to take initiative. Taking action to reverse a misfortune helps empower them and reinforces the idea that they have a locus of control.

16. Acknowledge that life transitions are inevitable and help children develop mental stamina to accept and adapt to these changes.

As a popular song reminds us, “You fall down, you get back up.”, but is that all there is to it? Learning how to stand on our own is a developmental milestone. The handholding, cheering and clapping that parents offer, encourage the toddler to move forward despite their inevitable falls. Parents who love, nurture, and encourage their children are parents who understand that they shape and influence their children’s lives. They raise children who bounce back and spring forward.