How to help kids weather the storms of life and emerge triumphant!
Listen to these scenarios and see if they sound familiar:
Mom arrives early at summer camp to pick out the best bunk for her child
Dad threatens legal action because his son didn’t make the team.
Parents upset that school closed at the last minute because of a snow storm and their children can’t handle last minute changes.
Have you heard of any of these or similar stories?
There is increasing evidence that today’s children are growing up less resilient than previous generations. There is a lot we can do to change this. We can help our children become resilient and emerge triumphant over their challenges.
Here are some tips for raising resilient children:
Be a good example of resilience.
Make mistakes in front of your kids. Ex: not doing a good job frosting a cake.
Admit your mistakes. Ex: Forgetting to water a plant and killing it.
Laugh at yourself for your mistakes. Ex: “Oh! I’ve been hitting the wrong note this whole song!”
Let them see you struggle. Ex: Changing a flat bike tire, figuring out a recipe.
Try new things. Show your growth. Ex: take an art class, teach yourself ASL, learn the Rubix cube or origami or how to juggle.
Give your children plenty of free play time without adults directing the activity. Let your baby learn how to stack blocks, do the shape sorter, and find puzzle pieces without you telling her. Let your child build forts, fly a kite, learn to jump rope, teach themselves piano, learn to juggle, do origami, decorate cookies, do fancy hairdos, and so much more! Kids teaching themselves skills builds a great amount of resilience over someone else teaching them.
Give your children plenty of family time. “Use family time like a security blanket and wrap them up in family closeness.” (I heard this somewhere, but don’t know where.) Play games, eat meals together, read outloud, go on road trips, do puzzles together, tend a garden. Children with lots of family time learn resilience naturally by watching parents and siblings do hard things. Children also feel loved, secure, and connected and can use their full love cup to give them the strength to weather the storms of life.
Look at photo albums and scrapbooks about past experiences. Talk about the hard things you’ve been through as a family: Grandpa’s death, car breaking down on the freeway, moving, power outages, etc. They can be little things like the dishwasher breaking or big things like natural disasters. Talking about how hard it was at the time but together you pulled through helps parents and children alike to see they can overcome hard things. Hard times are never here to stay. They do pass and you emerge stronger because of them.
Praise and encourage when they’re trying something new.
Remind them of other hardships they’ve overcome. “Remember when you learned to juggle…”
Start early and let them do things themselves. Ex: pouring own cereal and milk.
Provide them with lots of free time to practice skills like basketball or tricks on the trampoline all by themselves.
Talk about others your children admire who have done hard things like an Olympian, someone who hiked the Appalachian Trail, overcame odds to become a great singer, leader, politician, etc.
Check out books from the library about people doing hard things.
Listen to podcasts about people overcoming challenges like rebuilding after a fire, learning to walk after an accident, etc.
You Got This!
Raising resilient children is crucial in today’s tough times. But with you showing how you weather the storms of life gracefully, providing lots of close family time, and giving them free play time to learn how to do things themselves, your kids will be amazingly resilient! You Got This!! Check out the video for lots of examples of how to raise resilient children.
