Every child can build resilience by adapting well to the stress, trauma, and adversity of life. Parents can teach their child resilience by maintaining a healthy relationship and cultivating excellent interpersonal skills in children.
By building the skill of resilience, the child will be able to cope with different life battles and find the right solution. Resilience is a skill that one learns in life.
How To Build Resilience In Your Child?
- Avoid rescuing your child always from adverse conditions.
- Teach them how to calm themselves down.
- Allow them to learn about their emotions and how to monitor them.
- They should develop a strong character which is based on morals and principles.
- Do not compare your child with their siblings or make them feel incompetent.
- As their parents learn to accept your mistakes.
- Allow them to develop a positive outlook and increase their exposure.
What is Resilience
In the earlier days, resilience meant recovering from hardships and disasters. Researchers have talked about how adults and kids recovered from various tragedies like floods, fires, and hurricanes and bounced back rapidly.
It is seen that not everyone can get back to everyday life quickly and continue to struggle. Most families will look at resilience as to how the child faces any big challenges.
Nowadays, the meaning of resilience has broadened. It is not just about recovering and continuing to live your everyday life after going through a difficult situation but also becoming better when facing challenges and becoming a stronger person.
Nowadays, it is not just about events or tragedies but also about the everyday struggles kids or adults face in their daily lives.
Here is how you can build resilience:
- The child should build strong communication skills to express their feelings and emotions appropriately.
- Teach both problem-solver skills along with developing self-control.
- Discuss their emotions and the reason behind them.
- Create a structure to let them know about their boundaries and expectations from them.
- Allow them to struggle and learn lessons from the outcome.
- Do not allow them to cultivate victim mentality.
Resilience Building In Kids: Tips To Follow
Resilience is about the setbacks that one can face every day and find better and new ways to tackle things. To make little ones resilient, start as fast as you can. Here are some things that you need to follow:
Communication Skill
The child should learn how to use languages properly and have a strong understanding of it to interact successfully. Kids who know how to use languages correctly and have a strong vocabulary have shown excellent academic success. Understand the effects of fighting as well.
Make sure you are talking with your child or reading together because it will help in fostering excellent communication skills. Communication skill is essential because your child should know how to communicate about their feelings and emotions.
| Why are communication skills necessary? –Children can express emotions easily. –It reduces the gap between children and parents. –They will be able to interact properly without any hesitation. –A child with good communication skills, a stronghold of language, and good vocabulary is known to achieve more academic success. |
Problem solving and self-control
Teach kids to both express as well as release feelings. You can model the child’s behavior when it comes to responding to various emotions like anger, sadness, or happiness. You should also play some games that help build self-control like playing with lights or a musical chair.
You can talk with your child about resolving various problems, be it small or large, like cooking to making bill payments. You should always encourage the child to develop solutions to every problem they face and discuss the ideas.
| Why are problem-solving skills important? Rational decisions can easily be taken. The child will solve their problems by using proper strategies instead of always depending on their parents. If the child fails, they will be able to analyze what went wrong and use a better approach to solve it. |
Provide Structure
Every child needs to know what they can expect from their parents and what is expected from them. It is essential to provide a structure that will give a sense of comfort and security and reduce chaos from life.
Structuring can be similar to establishing a family routine that you regularly follow like bedtime or mealtime etc. The structure also includes expectations and rules and adhering to it.
Discuss Emotions
Children with high resilient power are known to have a warm and close relationship with their parents. To foster a warm relationship with a child, you need to talk about emotions. Children always look up to their parents when monitoring different types of behavior, which includes emotional regulation. They will learn the exact way of how you are expressing your feelings, be it sadness or anger.
A child should be able to talk about their negative and positive emotions without any hesitation. When you are talking with the child about emotions, they will be able to recognize their feelings and develop the right way to regulate the emotions effectively. Stop giving punishments to little minds every time.
Let Them Struggle
Every child is capable of developing resilience skills if their parents guide them properly. Whenever the child is struggling, it is an opportunity to build resilience, so do not dive in to save them from every situation. Your child should know how to act according to the problem.
Experience Rejection
Even when a child grows up, they fail to accept rejection. Teach kids that rejection will come but proper handling is a must.
Sometimes failures can make your child learn essential life lessons. They should know how to stay strong and handle failure. Failing does not mean that you have reached a dead-end in your life because you have myriads of other choices.
| Why is it essential to accept rejection? Children need to decipher that rejections will come. The child will be able to handle rejection and try to better themselves. It teaches how to stay strong when one faces rejection. |
Avoid Victim Mentality
Do not allow the child to develop the victim mentality. Whenever your kid is struggling, it is normal to blame other people. This is where the victim mentality grows. Most of the parents will always support their child instead of analyzing the situation.
You must teach the child that they need to stay strong even when life is unfair. Do not make your child think that they are the victim of the situation and side with them because, in the future, if the same problem happens, it will make them feel helpless.
Don’t Allow Them to Struggle Alone
The child needs to face struggle, but as a parent, if you are not supportive or telling them to deal with it alone could be emotionally challenging. You will have to validate the emotion of their child and empathize with that.
As a parent, you should know when you should step up to help your child during a struggle and allow them to face their battles alone. The parents need to teach their children all the skills to help them deal with the struggle. So in the future, if the child fails to face the battle alone, they will ask for the parent’s help.
Labeling Emotions And Feelings
Teach the child how to label the emotions. If your child says that he is mad or is angry, he is less likely to do something that will indicate that he is angry. Many parents fail to understand their children, who do not talk about their feelings or emotions. Empower them, teach them situations when they need to say NO.
Self Soothe
As parents, you should teach your child how to stay calm even during a difficult time. When your child is upset about a particular thing at an early age, you can ask them to start coloring or play with something that will help them calm down.
This will help them to understand their feelings and take responsibility and know-how to calm themselves down when they grow up.
Accepting Mistakes
If parents make some mistakes, they must own it and rectify them. It will let the child learn that one can fix their problem even if the mistake is grave. It will allow them to stay honest when it comes to facing issues in their life.
| Why should the parents learn to accept mistakes? –It teaches the child that no matter how big or small, one should accept their mistake and learn from it. –Children will accept mistakes and not deny anything. –He will understand why being completely honest is necessary. |
Learn From Consequences
If the child faces any negative outcome of the situation instead of making them feel like a failure, you should motivate them. Teach them strategies of how to come up with the right approach to get positive outcomes.
Discuss the Lessons Learned
After facing any disappointment or setback, allow your child to discuss it with you, and talk about their strategies. You can guide them on how they could have utilized a different strategy and deal with that differently. It will help them understand the reason behind the consequences and how to come up with a better problem-solving approach.
Increase Exposure
Allow your child to experience exposure because it will help experience positive emotions, motivation, self-esteem, predictability, optimism, etc.
Nurture Optimizing
In all the resilient people, you will find the common characteristics of optimism. As a parent, you should acknowledge how they view the world and allow them to see it differently without invalidating their feelings.
Competence
Competence will allow the child to know that they can handle the outcome of the situation. You need to allow the child to focus on their strength and identify their mistake.
If you have a protective mindset, make sure that you are not giving out the message to your child that you don’t think they are competent enough to manage things. Avoid making comparisons between the siblings. Follow proper parenting rules if you have recently separated from your partner.
Developing Character
The child needs to develop a character based on strong values and morals so that they will be able to differentiate wrong and right and develop a caring attitude towards people. You must teach them how behavior can affect other people and ask them to avoid hateful statements.
Frequently Asked Questions on How to Build Resilience in Kids
1. What is 7 C’s of resilience?
Control, connection, character, competence, coping, confidence, and contribution are the 7 Cs of resilience.
2. Is resilience a quality or skill?
Resilience is a skill that is developed by one’s outlook towards their life and responses. It is an adaptive skill that one develops gradually.
3. Is resilience a soft skill?
Yes, resilience is a soft skill and is highly essential to have if you’re working in an organization. It showcases your ability to bounce back from difficult situations and bounce forward in life.
Takeaway
Every child is unique in their way, and they need the right balance of challenge and support in their life to bring out the best in them. They need to learn from life experiences and develop problem-solving skills independently and sometimes with the parent’s guide.
One cannot learn resilience in a day, and there are thousands of approaches when it comes to teaching your child resilience. Resilience can make your child much happier and stronger in life.
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Mother of Two children. I’m a former teacher with a background in child development and a passion for Good parenting. I understand child development and know how to develop activities to help children learn and grow. Spare time, I enjoy spending time with my family, reading, and volunteering in my community.
