Resilience

For parents/carers

There are no doubt a number of challenges your children will face as they negotiate life. Helping them develop their resilience to navigate these challenges is an important task of parenting. Whilst resilience might be a trait in some, for the most part resilience is learnt.

Here are some tips from Dr Krause, Consultant Clinical Psychologist, for parents to help young people manage stress, uncertainty and upset, learn to problem solve, manage friendships and get the best of themselves.

There is no doubt that children and young people who have secure attachments have an inner sense of resiliency which helps them negotiate change with a positive sense of self-worth. The challenge for parents is to encourage children to step out of their comfort zone, to experience difficult emotions and not always have successful outcomes in order to learn how to deal with a range of emotions, come up with their own strategies of dealing with these and learn mastery.

Encouraging them to be curious about new discoveries and to take informed risks helps new learning and to build confidence.

Helping children and young people to develop a ‘growth mindset’ which encourages them to understand the steps they need to take to recover from failure (e.g. you haven’t got there as yet, but if we can work together to improve on x then things can improve).

Providing them with descriptive praise (e.g. you did well because you approached it in this way) helps develop a model for them to understand what they do right.

Providing children and young people with tools to identify their emotions starts from the time they are young. Re-labelling a temper tantrum as disappointment for example, provides the opportunity of ‘naming it to tame it’ and also teaches the child how to distinguish different emotions.

Learning to accept certain emotions (it’s ok to feel upset if you can’t have another chocolate but it’s not ok to kick someone because of it). Modelling positive emotions is a powerful teacher.

Teaching the basics of social skills, providing opportunities to make friends, helping negotiate relationship difficulties as they arise, conflict resolution strategies are all resilience skills. Not all children find making friends easy. Shy children, children who have behavioural difficulties, children with social communication difficulties all struggle in this area.

Keep providing opportunities for friendships – perhaps thinking out of the box on the type of friends and activities; keep providing gentle but consistent feedback on how they can get better connections, provide social scripts to help ease discomfort, help set expectations – keep them small and achievable, praising accomplishments, model positive social interactions.

Since children learn from observing parent behaviour you need to approach difficult matters in a consistent manner. Show them how you overcome challenges, discuss the steps you took to deal with a failure, express your emotions and show how you regulate them. Spend time to getting to know your children, show them you believe they can work out how to get the best of themselves, provide an optimistic view of the future.

You may also wish to look at the For teenagers section on tips given to children and young people on what they can do and help reinforce them.

Some tips for parents on managing digital resilience:

In addition to general resilience, today’s world poses a range of other challenges for parents including how to help manage the lure of technology.

What is digital resilience?

Digital resilience is a term that has recently been coined to describe ways to help children deal with whatever they may encounter in the online world. Support should be offered based on the developmental level of the child.

Some challenges include:

Up to 10 years:

Help them set limits by being clear about the limits you expect them to follow, provide safe controls, be involved – know what sites they are visiting and what they are doing online, provide opportunities for real life friendships, make friends with them on social media sites so you can check what is being posted.

Up to 12 years:

Keep up to date on what they are doing, carry out spot checks on their posts, educate on cyberbullying and be prepared to listen and take action. Keep parent controls, provide opportunities for real life social interactions, keep clear boundaries on what is permitted at home (e.g. no screens when eating together).

13 years plus:

Keep up to date on what they are doing, provide opportunities to boost self-confidence and self-esteem in ‘real life’ by doing things they enjoy and can master, have family ‘digital detox’ days, help them recognise positive and negative aspects of messages they may pick up online, keep emphasising the importance of sleep, be prepared to listen to concerns they may have, things they may have seen/read online.

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