Why Building Resilience In Childhood Is So Important
Have you ever wondered why building resilience in childhood is so important?
Resilience is a bit like the scaffolding and concrete holding the different parts of a house together. In the same way as we build a house, starting with a safe structure that is solid and helps us feel safe and protected, resilience is a strengthening factor that helps us to stand strongly on the ground regardless of the circumstances around us.
Like a great recipe, tested again and again, adjusted to make it better, thought through and reliable, resilience creates a new version of ourselves after each incident that did not break us.
It is like an old-fashioned photo album of good and bad events which have shaped us and made us into the person we are now. How well we coped with what life has thrown our way will depend on how we have been taught to perceive, navigate and react to what happens to us.
What exactly is resilience?
Resilience by definition is ‘the capacity to withstand or to recover quickly from difficulties…an ability to spring back into shape’.
This assumes that we go through something difficult and then recover. It does not say ‘someone comes along and makes everything bad or difficult go away’. There are obstacles and we navigate them, similar to the bear hunt, we need to learn to go through them.
Why building resilience is so much better than ‘fixing it’
When our children are babies, we need to do everything for them, exterminate dangers and create pure safety. They are so dependent, it’s our job to protect them all day long. But gradually their progress is aimed at their increasing independence, to leave home one day and live without us watching over them.
Why is resilience important for a child?
Working with parents over the last few years, I have noticed that our idea of resilience has morphed into the idea of us parents creating a perfect world for our children, free of conflict and obstacles; trying to adjust the world on the outside to the needs of our children, removing all difficulties, rather than strengthening our children to cruise this world.
It is no coincidence parenting styles like ‘helicopter-parent’ and ‘tiger-mum’ have been used to describe our deep desire to support our children, sometimes with extreme measures.
The reason for this, not surprisingly, is that our world has changed so much.
Most of us parents might remember a time when we freely roamed the streets for hours without our parents knowing where we were.
We’d spend hours at someone else’s house or cycling through the village or town we were living in. Most of us had some kind of random ‘be home at dinner time’ timetable.
What this ‘free range’ life gave us was a huge palette of experiences and situations we had to handle ourselves, deal with, negotiate with peers and make decisions on the spot. We got to see what the immediate results and consequences of our decision were.
This enabled us to learn directly from those unique moments and learn by experience.
What has changed?
The world is more dangerous: more traffic and more awareness around ‘dodgy’ people trying to approach children has increased our instinct to protect our kids accordingly
We travel further to schools we like, making independent travelling impossible
Busy schedules around work and after-school clubs making drop off and pick up a normality
Friends and family live further away, our social networks have changed and are not always solid
The world is interconnected and our parental brains are flooded with information and wisdom everywhere. We have lost touch with our ‘gut feeling’. Our primitive brain will do what it needs to protect at all cost.
The knowledge we have about everything from baby years to adulthood has changed and yet in terms of resilience, we have gone backwards. Starting school is no longer the start of more independence.
When is the start of independence and why is resilience important for a child?
Independence is a gradual process starting from birth. Our children, little by little, become independent, needing us a little less each time as they start to feed themselves, walk, use the toilet and talk. They gradually move away from us towards their own, one day, full independence.
How do I build resilience skills in my child?
Strong relationships are a good basis for resilient kids. They learn by example and having different role models to observe is of great value. Different people have different wisdom, we all choose with whom to discuss different topics. Give kids a choice of people to relate to and make them feel safe, valued and supported.
Nourish friendships: Having friends in school and outside of school is gold. If things fall apart in the school tribe, having a neutral caring person to go to is very reassuring and can be a lifeline for children.
Normalising, welcoming and role modelling failure: ‘What did you fail at today?’ was what extremely successful businesswoman Sara Blakely was asked by her father daily. We all try many things hundreds of times before we are really good at it. With social media showing only the best of the best, make sure your kids can see that it is normal to try and fail many times before the actual success.
‘Driving instructor parent’: I created this word to describe my ideal parenting style. We sit, see, observe and advise but they have to do it themselves. Just like we wanted it when we were their age!
Praising character traits rather than achievements/competence
When we focus on our children’s character strengths and what comes to them naturally, we are focusing on who they are as a person. Recognising for example that our child is great at trying again and again or supporting others is of so much more value than praising the great score in a maths test. It will allow our children to recognise the strength they might need later in life. If we praise accomplishments and they do badly at some point, there is only a sense of failure. Being applauded for not giving up is a lifelong useful skill.Create a growth mindset by role modelling how to perceive things, a glass half-full kind of view. If things at school were difficult ask ‘That sounds difficult, how did you manage to get through the day?’, our child can recognise their strength and still feel like a winner after a dreadful day.
Teach emotional regulation. Children learn by observation and imitating. If we model healthy emotional reactions by expressing our feelings and demonstrating calmness in difficult situations, they will too. In short, before we can teach children resilience, we need to strengthen our own.
Teach them practical skills. In a world where children gradually increase their presence in the digital world, having practical skills is a massive bonus. Not only will this set them apart from their peers in the future it also gives them self-esteem as they are much more confident in finding solutions themselves.
Remember, building resilience is a lifelong process. We are all unique and the process is different for everyone. But as parents, we can certainly prepare the ground, use good quality ingredients and provide good instructions.
I hope you found this blog post by Veronique as insightful as I did. If you're eager to learn more about Veronique and the incredible support she offers to families, both in parenting and beyond, I warmly invite you to explore her website and reach out to her today. You can find her at: