When you first lay eyes on your child, you make a promise to him or her that you will never let anything or anyone harm them. Then the real world meets your child and inflicts the bumps, bruises and emotional let-downs that come with losing a game or not getting invited to the party. Accepting the fact that unless you want to stick her in a bubble suit and never let her out of the house again, you are left with only choice. You work to support your child and help her become emotionally resilient despite the hardships and ups and downs that come with living in the real world.
“When my son is left out of an event, it makes me really sad, but I can’t make people include him even if I want to. So I try to explain to him that sometimes in life you don’t always get to be included in an event,” Katrina Johnigan, Kansas City mother and educator, says. “However I also try to instill in him that when he leaves other kids out, they feel the same way, and I encourage him to be inclusive.”
Resilience is the term often used, from a psychological perspective, to describe the process of adapting to or overcoming challenges of adversity, loss, hardships or other stressors in life. In general, it refers to overcoming or “bouncing back” from hard times. For children and teens, negotiating their emotional experiences of being left out of a group activity with their friends or getting cut from a team can be difficult to handle and elicit an emotional response of anger or sadness. The emotions themselves are natural and to be expected. In fact, many times they are tools that we use to help us move through the stages of “bouncing back” from adversity.
Everyday life experiences, as well as times of adversity, are all opportunities that can help your child learn the behaviors that develop healthy resilience. The good news is that being resilient is not something you either have or don’t; it can be taught and strengthened in various ways. Working to build resilience differs from person to person, even within the same family. Because resilience varies greatly depending on life experiences, family and community structures and a person’s natural emotional tolerance, researching and teaching this trait is difficult. However, some common strategies have been found successful when working with children to build healthy resilience.
As a parent, you can make sure that your child has several different sources of personal connection, both inside and outside of the family. Expose your child to various experiences and help him build a network of people who care about him. You can encourage healthy behaviors in general to support strong mental health, such as physical activity and nutritious eating habits. Model and teach emotions by listening to him and helping him properly label how he feels. Then teach him how to express those emotions.
Discuss the idea that change is a part of life and that sometimes this change leads us to things that we may have never otherwise done. For instance, if your child is cut from a team, it may open up an opportunity to try a different activity and help her to keep things in perspective—this is not really the end of the world. And, when playing games with your child, teach her to win or lose with a respectful attitude. “My boys play basketball and last year they won a lot of games, but this year not so much,” Johnigan says. “It was hard for them to have so many losses, but I try to talk with them about how sometimes you win and sometimes you lose and that there will be another season and that you have to get back up and keep working.”
By using opportunities that your children experience in everyday life, you can help them to develop resilience, which, in turn, helps your children overcome trials throughout their lifetimes.
Karah Thornton is a school psychologist in the Kansas City area. She encourages the healthy expression of emotions.