How do you become more resilient? How do you develop the tendency to look at the glass half-full rather than half-empty?
Is it just a matter of your personality?
Absolutely not! While some resilience is innate, it can also be learned from the people in your life. Keep reading to learn how parents, teachers, and other adults play a role in building resilience in children.
What Is Resilience?
First, let’s make sure we’re all on the same page. What we’re talking about here is the ability to confront life’s challenges with a positive attitude and overcome difficult situations.
We don’t mean just pasting on a smile and pretending like everything is okay. That tends to be more damaging to your mental health. But we do mean learning to take hardships in stride without getting overly stressed about them or taking a hard hit to your mental health.
Where Does Your Child Get Resilience?
Resilience doesn’t come from just one place. Some of it is an innate part of your child. Some kids are just naturally more positive about everything or more likely to try again when they failed the first time.
However, resilience can also be learned from the people around your child. Parents, teachers, and any other adults that come into contact with your child have an opportunity to help them build resilience.
Ways to Help Children Become More Resilient
Tough situations aren’t the only way to learn resilience, so don’t think you have to purposely create heartache and difficulty for the children in your life.
Instead, you can gently encourage a child to try again after a failure. Teach them to work towards their goals one step at a time and understand that failure is often part of the journey to success.
When they make mistakes, use them as learning experiences. Talk through what they could have done differently and explain how to approach the situations differently in the future.
Encourage them to think positive thoughts and look for the silver lining in every situation. Plus, invite them to talk to you or another trusted adult when they are struggling.
For children facing particularly difficult circumstances such as the death of a parent, mental health therapy for children is an excellent resource. An experienced mental health professional can help children in ways that might seem confusing to the average person.
Living a Happy Life
Learning to be resilient is one of the keys to a happy life. Fair weather is not always promised. In fact, storms will happen in everyone’s life eventually.
However, the way that you respond to the storms has far more bearing on your quality of life than the actual challenges you face. One of the best gifts you can give a child is to help them build their own resilience to better weather life’s storms.
