As a parent, one of the greatest gifts you can give your children is helping them build resilience and confidence. With resilience, they can deal with life’s challenges, trauma or obstacles and bounce back from all these. Resilient children are also confident, adaptable to changing circumstances and unafraid to face the unknown.
What Is Resilience?
If there’s one thing people can depend on to carry them through life’s ups and downs, it’s the quality of being resilient. Resilience refers to people’s ability to cope with the different stressors they encounter in life: financial problems, unemployment, academic requirements, problematic relationships, divorce, death and other kinds of losses.
Where Resilience Comes From
Resilience grows from within, and its formation is influenced by various factors in your children’s life. These factors include the quality of your relationship with each other, whether their needs are being met, etc.
How to Build Resilience in Children
To help your children develop resilience, there are specific tips you can implement, including the following:
1. Help your kids build positive relationships with significant people in their lives.
Whether it’s with their friends or older family members, such as aunts, uncles and grandparents, let your children nurture these key relationships. These people form part of your kids’ core support circle and offline social network. Allow them to spend time with other children, encourage friendships and have them celebrate birthdays or spend certain holidays with your extended family when they want to.
2. Encourage your children to express, understand and manage their feelings.
Teach your kids about the need to be honest about their feelings and to never keep things bottled up. Encourage them to pursue interests that’ll help them express their emotions in constructive ways, such as participating in sports, taking up art or music, writing and so on.
Also, tell them you love them whenever you feel like it so they also develop a similar kind of spontaneity. Inculcate in them the importance of speaking their mind whilst also being considerate of other people’s feelings.
3. Guide them in setting personal goals and tackling challenges.
Encourage your kids to plan goals they want to achieve, such as learning to ride a bike or overcoming their fear of public speaking by joining a junior orators’ club. This will not only boost their self-esteem but also help them develop a sense of responsibility and control over what they achieve.
Let them know that whether they accomplish their goals or not, the more important things are the lesson they learn from the experience and the fact that they can keep trying.
4. Inculcate in them the skills to focus on the details and see the bigger picture at the same time.
You can do this during storytelling time. Make time for a discussion session where you can ask about their favourite characters, the conflict in the story or problems encountered by the hero. Then follow these up with, “Why?” Based on their answers, you can zero in on the details and then relate these details to the bigger picture.
If you find this aspect of parenting particularly challenging, you can get professional advice from an experienced therapist for a child who’s badly in need of encouragement and positivity.
