Resilience

Resilience is more than just coping. When you’re resilient, you’re more prepared to seek new ways to overcome your challenges and achieve your goals. Although this might mean taking some risk, it also creates opportunities for growth and greater self-confidence. 

Why Pre-teens and Teenagers need Resilience

All pre-teens and teenagers face everyday challenges like arguments with friends, disappointing test results or sporting losses. Your child needs resilience to bounce back and learn from these challenges.

Some young people face more serious challenges like family breakdown, family illness or death, or bullying. And some have more challenges than others because of disability, learning difficulties or disorders, mental health issues, chronic health conditions and so on. Resilience will help them with these challenges.

Resilience is Uneven. 

We want our children to be able to bounce back in every setting, but realistically, they’ll be able to handle different settings with varied levels of resilience. That’s because resilience is uneven. In fact, it might be that precisely because they are showing extraordinary resilience in one setting, that they will “let go” in another. For example, school may present so many challenges that it takes all your children’s energy to keep it together there. That may make things more fragile or explosive at home. In this case, take it as a sign of security and trust in the reliability of your love and support that home is where they can display vulnerabilities.

Positive Thinking Habits for Resilience

Resilience is about being realistic, thinking rationally, looking on the bright side, finding the positives, expecting things to go well and moving forward, even when things seem bad. By helping your child practise positive thinking habits and strategies, you can help them build resilience too.

Here are some ideas.

When your child is upset, you can help them keep things in perspective by focusing on facts and reality. For example, you could try gently asking, ‘I know you must be feeling disappointed, but does this really matter as much as you think it does? On a scale from 1-10, how bad is it really?’

You can also help your child understand that a bad thing in one part of their life doesn’t mean everything is bad. For example, if your child gets a poor exam result, you could point out that it won’t stop them from playing weekend sport or going out with friends.

Working with your child on problem-solving strategies can help your child feel they have the power to deal with difficult situations and get through challenging times.

It’s also important for your child to feel, talk through and calm down after difficult emotions like anxiety, fear and anger. Working through difficult emotions will help your child realise that these feelings don’t last forever.

And it’s good for your child to have simple strategies for turning low moods into better ones. Here are some ideas:

• Do things they enjoy or that help them relax, like watching a series, riding a bike or reading a good book.

• Spend time with friends or support people.

• Do something kind for someone else.

• Do some physical activity, like playing sport or going for a vigorous walk.