How to Raise a Resilient Child

Being resilient means being able to handle things that don’t work out ideally. It leads to finding creative solutions to problems. A resilient child is better equipped to bounce back from emotional hurts and cope with failure.

In short, being resilient is about surviving and learning from life’s adversities.

How does this sense of recovery and emotional strength develop?

What can parents do to help kids learn to handle failure and futility?

Fortunately, childhood is filled with opportunities for children to develop resilience. Kids encounter challenges every day that bring up inevitable feelings of frustration, anger, sadness, or fear. Things such as:

• Not being able to have their own way all the time
• Losing at games or contests
• Not feeling smart enough
• Failing
• Wanting to hold on to a good experience
• Not being able to have mom or dad all to themselves
• Wishing to go back in time (wanting to change something they’ve done)
• Wanting to “send back” a sibling
• Not being big enough/ tall enough/ strong enough for their own satisfaction
• Being excluded (among peers or siblings)
• Not being able to control outcomes or another’s decisions or choices

In these situations, we are inclined to offer rationalization, justification, and protection from life’s futilities.

“What do you mean you don’t like your picture? It’s beautiful!”

“You’re really good at this game. Let’s play again and maybe this time you’ll win!”

“Oh, you don’t want to play with those kids anyway if they’re not going to invite you.”

How to Raise a Resilient Child

Our instinct is to protect our kids, but in our eagerness to do so, it’s also easy to overprotect. We tend to want to shield our kids from all of life’s difficulties. After all, we just want them to be happy.

The thing is, a little discontentment is the very thing that’s needed when it comes to a child’s development of resilience. The more we try to protect children in difficult situations, the more we send the message we’re afraid they’re unable to handle them.

But they can.

And they will, if they’re given both opportunity and support. Here are four steps to help children develop resilience:

Allow Your Child to Get Frustrated

They must experience adversity, frustration, and mistakes such as those in the examples listed above. There is no way for children to learn how to recover from life’s challenges if they are never in unpleasant situations. So when it happens, resist the inclination to remove hardship and soothe away your child’s unhappy feelings.

Let the events unfold as they will, and allow your child to experience a difficult situation.

Encourage Your Child to Express Their Feelings

Whether they’re due to frustration, anger or sadness, tears are a healthy and necessary step to move towards resiliency. Tears are the manifestation of feelings and allow the brain to process the emotional component of a problem.

Once the emotions are expressed, children are then able to access the areas of the brain that process logic, reasoning, and self-control. These processes are necessary for recovery. They are able to develop a “work-around” and adapt to the futility of the situation.

Acknowledge and Validate Those Feelings

Provide a safe environment for kids to express their feelings by allowing tears, empathizing, and supporting them through their difficult emotions.

Come alongside children with a comforting hug or words of understanding to let them know that their feelings are normal and they’re not going to be shushed, punished, or shamed for them. Let the emotions flow and know that they are helping your child’s brain discover its adaptive process.

Offer nervous system regulation techniques and kid-friendly somatic exercises to help work through uncomfortable situations and keep the energy moving so it doesn’t get stuck in the body.

Offer Encouragement

Help kids through their hardships with acknowledgement of their strengths and capabilities. To raise a resilient child, let him know you trust in his ability to survive. Help him find success after failure.

After the tears have subsided, encouraging words validate kids’ experiences and help them find their own way to move forward.

Empathy is the cornerstone of raising emotionally resilient children. When we acknowledge and validate a child’s feelings, it helps them feel understood and supported.

Instead of dismissing their fears, actively listen and offer comfort. If your child is anxious about starting school, instead of saying, “There’s nothing to worry about,” try saying, “I understand that starting something new can feel scary. It’s okay to feel that way.”

Make sure they know they can come to you for guidance and support. But always look for situations to allow them to come up with their own solutions and cheer them on:

“I have faith that you’ll figure this out.”

“What are your ideas?”

“Is there a solution that will meet everyone’s needs?”

“Trust yourself; I do.”

Everyday Ways to Build Resilience

Here are a few other things you can do in a regular basis to create a safe, supportive environment and encourage a child’s development of resiliency:

• Spend one-on-one time each day (with a young child), or each week (with an older one). Allow the child to decide the activity, and to take the lead in the topics of conversation. Your focus is on listening and getting to know your child just a little bit better. This creates the connection you need for encouraging them to express their feelings.

• Substitute punishment with problem solving. The unpleasantness of a punishment may work in the short-term, but it is much more effective to teach kids how to own their mistakes and fix them.

• Instead of approaching misbehavior with the thought of, “What can I do to you so that you’ll learn a lesson?” approach it with the perspective of, “How can we solve this problem?” This teaches kids that mistakes are fixable and aren’t anything to be feared.

• Don’t rescue them from their feelings, but acknowledge all feelings as real and acceptable. They more they are allowed to feel their feelings when they are young, the more capable they will be of understanding and managing them as they get older.

• Switch from time-outs to time-ins. A time-out is sending a child away to an isolated area to deal with their feelings alone. A time-in, or positive time-out, is a connective moment spent with a child to help them calm down and learn how to regulate their emotions. This helps a child feel better so they can do better.

• Provide opportunities for autonomy and responsibility. In order to raise a resilient child, give them control over as many areas of life as possible. From choosing their own clothes to fixing their own food to deciding how to spend their allowance; let them make their own choices — and the mistakes that come with them. Recovering from mistakes is where resilience comes from, but kids need to have those opportunities in the first place.

• Model resilience. By modeling resilience in your own behavior, you can teach your child how to handle challenges effectively. When faced with a difficult situation, try to demonstrate positive coping strategies, such as staying calm, focusing on solutions, and maintaining a positive outlook. Show your child that it’s okay to make mistakes and experience setbacks. By acknowledging your own challenges and discussing how you overcome them, you provide a powerful example of resilience in action.

As developmental psychologist Dr. Gordon Neufeld says, “We are changed by that which we cannot change.”

When we encounter futility, we adapt. This begins in childhood as kids are exposed to life’s frustrations and are given an environment in which they are free to make mistakes, express their feelings and learn. Most of all, it is our connected, accepting relationship with our children that will help them grow strong.