10 Ways To Raise Resilient Children
You have probably heard a lot about the word “resilience”. In the event that there is still someone who does not understand its meaning, we will briefly explain it: it is the “human capacity to flexibly deal with extreme situations and overcome them”. In this article, we will give parents some guidelines for raising resilient children.
In this way, both parents and children will be able to take advantage of the adverse situations that arise in the course of life and deal with them in the best possible way.
“A good half of the art of living is resilience”.
How to educate resilient children?
Resilience is a skill we can all develop and learn. Resilient children successfully cope with adversity, trauma, tragedy, threats or even major sources of stress. Thanks to resilience, parents can help them manage stress and feelings of anxiety and uncertainty in difficult times.
Resilience is essential to cope with times of crisis and change. Resilient people use problems to grow. This does not mean that they do not suffer in the face of difficulties, but they are able to overcome them, focusing on the solution and adapting to new circumstances.
Each of us can develop resilience but the interesting thing is that we can help our children master it too. Resilience involves behaviors, thoughts and actions that can be learned over time. Here are the guidelines proposed by the American Psychological Association to develop resilience (APA, 2020):
1. Build relationships
Teach your children to make friends, including the ability to empathize with or feel the pain of the other. Encourage them to make friends. Relationships with others provide us with social support and strengthen resilience. Furthermore, a strong family network supports our children in the face of the inevitable disappointments and pains of life.
2. We help our children by encouraging them to help others
Helping others can help children overcome feelings of helplessness under certain circumstances. Encouraging children to do age-appropriate volunteer work and ask for help with homework can be helpful.
3. Maintain a daily routine to raise resilient children
Sticking to and maintaining a routine can be quite comforting for kids, especially toddlers, who crave some stable points in their life. Hence, it is good to encourage our children to maintain their own routines.
4. Take a break
Teaching children to focus on something other than what worries them is very important. Parents need to watch and monitor what their children are exposed to, whether it’s the news, the Internet, or the conversations they listen to, and make sure they take a break from those things if they cause them restlessness or discomfort.
5. Self-care
Set a good example and teach your children the importance of taking the time to eat properly, exercise and rest. Make sure they have time to have fun and that they haven’t planned their life without a moment to relax. Taking care of themselves and even having fun will help them maintain emotional balance and cope with stressful times better.
6. Have goals for raising resilient children
Teach your children to set reasonable goals and then proceed slowly to achieve them. Moving towards the goal, even with small steps, and receiving praise for doing so, will keep them focused on results rather than what they failed to achieve and can help them develop resilience to face life’s challenges.
7. Cultivate positive self-esteem
Remind your children of a past situation and how they were able to cope successfully despite the difficulties. So help them understand that those past challenges will help them have the strength to face future challenges.
Help them learn to trust themselves to solve problems and make the right decisions. Teach them to have a sense of humor and to be able to laugh at themselves.
8. Maintain perspective and a positive attitude to raise resilient children
Show them that there is a future beyond the complicated situation they are experiencing and that the future can be bright. An optimistic and positive attitude allows us to realize the good things in life and to move forward even in the most difficult moments.
9. Discovering yourself
Difficult moments must turn into moments of discovery and self-knowledge, in which both children and adults learn more about themselves. Help your children understand that what they are going through can help them find their strengths.
10. Acceptance: Change is part of life
Changes can be difficult for both children and adolescents to accept. Help them discover that the world is constantly changing and that changes are part of life. Present goals can always be replaced by new future goals, otherwise you have to wait another moment to reach them.
Resilient children equals happy children
As you have seen, these 10 tips can be of great help when it comes to raising resentful children who are able to overcome adversity and emerge stronger from complicated situations. What are you waiting for to put them into practice?
