What is Resilience?

If you can, imagine a beach ball floating on top of a bathtub of water.

When you push it down, the beach ball sinks, but once released, it bounces back to the top. But take the air out of the beachball and it will remain sunk.

This is resilience – the ability to bounce back when things are hard. Other ways to describe resilience include:

• Dealing with challenges and still holding your head up
• Giving things a go or trying your best even when you’re not the best
• Being strong on the inside

Resilience is a foundational skill for both adults and children. Some people have more natural resilience, but everyone can learn and grow in this area.

5 tips for developing resilience in children

1. Help them manage uncertainty

Parents can help their children feel safe and secure during uncertain times by helping them recognise that life is actually less certain than they think – but this is okay. In fact, it can be exciting not knowing exactly what will happen – surprises can sometimes be nice!

Remind them of times when unexpected events in their lives turned out to be great. Keep a journal with them of all uncertain things in their lives and note how they turn out. They won’t all turn out to be good, but that’s okay too (see the second tip). 

2. How to cope with set-backs

Not all unexpected events are good of course, and building resilience is about helping children cope with disappointment and things going wrong. Encourage your kids to talk about feelings and emotions so that they can recognise and label the feelings of disappointment and frustration that are normal reactions to set-backs. Help them to name these feelings when they notice them.

Show them that set-backs are an important part of life and lead by example – talk openly about things that have gone wrong in your life and demonstrate how to bounce back.

3. Embrace mistakes

Resilient children are less afraid of making mistakes and more prepared to take risks – because they can cope with having got it wrong. Explain how we don’t always know the answers or the right way to behave, but we can make the best choices we can – and accept if we get it wrong. This means showing them that mistakes are great ways to learn and are part of what makes us human.

You could even encourage them to make mistakes. Whether that be with homework, or craft projects or creating a new dish for supper – encourage them to take risks. Show them that making mistakes helps us learn.

4. Empower your kids

Resilient children are able to make age-appropriate decisions about the things that affect them. All parents want to protect their kids – it’s part of the job description, but when we try too hard to protect them from life’s bumps we can do more harm than good to their developing resilience.

When parents make choices for their child and are over-involved in their lives, children learn that they can't trust themselves and grow up believing that others always know better. Part of being resilient is learning to become independent and to trust in our own abilities – whilst asking for help where appropriate.

5. Challenge their beliefs

Finally, resilient children develop helpful, rather than unhelpful, ways of thinking. Examples of unhelpful thinking styles include catastrophising (assuming the very worse will happen), black and white thinking (seeing things only as either good or bad), ignoring the positives (dismissing when good things happen and only focusing on when bad things happen), fortune-telling (assuming they know what is going to happen) and over-generalisation (assuming that because something happened once, it will always be that way).

Challenge these beliefs by explaining the flaws in their thinking styles and that we all make such thinking mistakes sometimes and helping them see alternative perspectives that may be equally valid.

Don’t forget – The Resilient Parent - FREE - Tomorrow

You’re invited to join Dr Justin Coulson for this FREE 30 minute webinar to explore the secrets to resilience as a parent. You’ll learn:

-How to be a more resilient parent
-How to show up in a way that is good for you and for your kids
-How to model resilience for your kids so they can better weather the storms of life
-How to sustain connection with your child when we you feel like you're going under

Click here to register now. Even if you can’t make it, you will have access to the recording for 7 days.