Adversity is Inevitable. Support is Essential. Together they build Resilience.
What we know is that we learn resilience and distress tolerance through experiencing hardship – not through avoidance. What we also know is that it’s difficult learn alone.
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Adversity is Inevitable – Support is Essential. Together they build Resilience.
Your child throws a block after the entire tower falls over; says “you do it for me!” when they can’t fit the puzzle piece in the right spot; or crumples up the paper and says “I give up!” when they can’t figure out their math assignment.
They stay in their room for weeks after being dumped by their social group, yell profusely and call you every name in the book when you tell them they can’t go out with friends because of a family commitment or have a complete meltdown when they lose a game.
We talk a lot about the importance of resilience in these moments – recovering from hardship, adapting to and moving forward from setbacks and handling moments of challenge in proportion to their magnitude. Often as parents we want our children to stop being upset and not be so emotionally impacted and distraught. And often we want to orchestrate the situation so that the distress doesn’t come up in the first place.
Yet what we know is that we learn resilience and distress tolerance through experiencing hardship – not through avoidance. What we also know is that it’s difficult to learn alone.
It is adversity plus support that builds resilience, say William Stixrud and Ned Johnson, authors of “What Do You Say?: How to Talk with Kids to Build Motivation, Stress Tolerance, and a Happy Home”.
Why is it that some children move through hard times while others crumble? The main factor is support – they’ve had a responsive adult in their lives who empathizes with their situation, listens to their feelings and helps them learn to respond adaptively. “The single most common factor for children who develop resilience is at least one stable and committed relationship with a supportive parent, caregiver, or other adult,’ says the Harvard Center on the Developing Child. And if children grow up in environments of toxic stress and trauma, the need for supports in developing resilience is even more crucial.
“Part of teaching your child to be resilient is first projecting resilience yourself”, says New York Times columnist Eric Vance in “The Secret to Raising a Resilient Kid”. We need to be able to regulate our own emotions when we find ourselves challenged by our children – a huge feat of resilience – if we are to teach our children that same quality. When parents respond harshly or critically to a child's emotional upsets, children are less likely to be able to manage their own.
What does resilience-building support look like?
Don’t shield or rescue. Children and teens need opportunities to practice and build resilience. We need to let kids do things on their own, make mistakes and take risks. If the block tower falls over or the math problem is too hard and your child just wants you to do it for them, resist. Resist jumping in to call the teacher, make a doctor’s appointment, solve the conflict or pick up the mess when your child or teen is perfectly capable of doing so themselves. While avoiding the trigger can bring momentary comfort, it doesn’t build resilience for the long term. Challenge is an important skill builder, and if we pave the way for our kids while they are in our homes, they will have a rude awakening when they go out into the world and encounter hardship. As psychologist Becky Kennedy, author of book and parenting platform “Good Inside” says, we need to “see the need, not meet the need.”
Help them with problem solving. Say to your struggling algebra student or puzzle master, if you can’t figure this out, what else can you do? What are some other solutions you could try? What do you know about this problem so far? Putting down a puzzle piece and trying another one is a huge regulatory strategy, says Kennedy.
Project confidence. As Teresse Lewis says in her Tedx talk “How to build resilient children”, the messages children receive are the messages they repeat to themselves. Their inner voices develop from the voices they hear around them. Our kids need to know we believe in them and their capabilities. Communicate courage and hope.
Normalize Frustration. Remind your kids that sometimes that feeling of frustration is so loud it makes you want to give up. As Kennedy says, we want to help our kids learn that that voice is just part of us. We can acknowledge that feeling and perhaps create some positive self talk around it. “This is hard and I can do hard things”. Just as important is to share your times of frustration with your kids and model your self-talk. “I’m learning this new task. I haven’t quite figured it out yet. With time and practice, I can get it. Everything is OK.”
Tolerate your kids’ emotions. As Kennedy writes, “resilience comes from the ability to tolerate tough feelings, not get out of tough feelings, and our kids can only tolerate the emotions that we tolerate in them”. So dive into the emotions and the challenging situation with them. Explore what happened rather than dismissing or shutting down the conversation. Work on soothing yourself so you can build up your own tolerance for their outbursts.
Be with them. Most importantly what we all need, infant through adult, is to know we are not alone in our struggles. We need to be able to effectively communicate to our kids that we really see them in their challenges, small and large. Saying, “just get over it” does not help a child become more resilient. What helps them become more resilient is learning that they can get through the emotion. They learn this through your support and presence, understanding and validation and looking for a solution, all without solving the problem for them.
Don’t prioritize happiness. This is a hard one and may seem counterintuitive, but as Kennedy says, “the more we emphasize our children's happiness and ‘feeling better,’ the more we set them up for an adulthood of anxiety.” If we are focused solely on building happiness, then we work toward avoiding discomfort and tough emotions over all else. Yet going through these experiences is the very thing that teaches us to tolerate them. Of course we want our kids to be happy. It just can’t be our sole priority. Again Kennedy says our children need to hear, “discomfort happens, discomfort is where I learn. I am not scared of discomfort because I learned to tolerate it in my childhood – because my parents tolerated it in me.”
Build your tolerance for frustration and challenge – especially in regards to your kids. By doing this you help them do the same. Listen, understand and encourage rather than avoid, shut down or rescue. With time and the hard practice of moving through challenges, your children and teens will build their resilience muscle with confidence and maybe even some grace.
