Student Wellbeing
Resilience is a relevant topic at this time and at Galilee we strive to provide our students with strategies and experiences that can help them develop into resilient people.
Please read this article written by Michael Grose to help you support them at home too.
BUILDING RESILIENCE IN KIDS
Resilience is a concept that has become a part of the parenting lexicon over the past decade or so in not only Australia and many other countries too.
It’s certainly a concept I’ve been talking and writing about for over two decades, and its importance can’t be understated, particularly if you listen to futurists such as Mark McCrindle. He predicts that the children born in 2010 and beyond will have a minimum of five careers and twenty different employers in their lifetime.
Gone is the job for life, replaced by a series of mini-careers, according to McCrindle. He claims we need to get used to being employed for the life of a particular project and then be prepared to look for other projects upon completion. If this scenario is accurate, and I suspect it is because it’s happening already, then young people entering the workforce of the future will need personal resilience to handle the ups, downs and disappointments that will come from more flexible working arrangements.
My colleague, psychologist Andrew Fuller, refers to resilience as the ability to bungee jump your way through life. It’s a fabulous metaphor that suggests the notion of bouncing back from difficulties and getting back on track with your life when difficulties have been experienced. The research around resilience suggests that with the right support and right set of skills most people do bounce back and get back on track. But there’s a cohort who don’t merely recover from difficulty – they grow through difficulty, with their lives taking on new or greater meaning. They, in effect, bounce forward using a negative event as the impetus for growth and development. And that is what we should want for our children – to continually learn and grow from their experiences whether positive or negative.
Is resilience nature or nurture?
Some kids are resilient by nature – their temperament helps them to be mentally and psychologically tough. You know those kids. They get straight back up after a setback or disappointment. Rejection in the playground doesn’t faze them. They are flexible enough to cope with changes such as moving from one school to another. They keep working hard in school even if they don’t succeed at first. They have a resilient spirit.
Unfortunately, not every child has such natural resilience. The good news is that most of the research on the subject indicates that resilience can be nurtured and developed, particularly when parents themselves are resilient and actively foster this characteristic in their kids.
Resilient kids share four basic skills: autonomy, problem solving, optimism and social connection. There are many ways parents can develop these skills in their children, but perhaps the easiest and most accessible way is to allow kids to fully contribute to their family. By developing your child’s self-help skills, you will promote independence and resourcefulness in them.
Children’s life experiences contribute to their resilience
The seemingly small disappointments that kids experience – not being invited to a party, missing being picked in a sports team, not achieving success in a school project the first time – help them learn to cope with hardship and frustration. Coping with minor development issues such as change, sibling conflict and even failure, build up a psychological hardiness that will help them when they face some of life’s big challenges in adolescence and beyond.
That means that you, as a parent, need to resist sorting out your children’s social problems for them; rather, you need to skill them up to solve their own friendship challenges. Sometimes parents can create problems by interfering in children’s disputes. From the resilience perspective you are better off coaching kids through some of their more challenging moments and reviewing what they may have learned for next time.
You also need to put children and young people in situations where they need to draw on their resourcefulness. Camps and adventure activities are great ways for kids to stretch themselves and test their problem-solving and coping skills. My second daughter, Emma (she of the Danish Adventure), believes that a ten-day adventure camp she went on, as a fourteen-year-old was the defining event of her early adolescence. It involved real physical endeavour, which stretched her to the limits, literally bringing her to tears on many occasions. It was the first time she realised that she could cope with being separated from her friends and family as well as the comforts of home. While away in Denmark she frequently drew on the coping skills she had learned on her ten-day camp to overcome homesickness and deal with the challenges of living in an unfamiliar environment for such a long time.
Regular positive parent–child interactions help kids pick up the basic social skills needed to interact with their peers, as well as more subtle resilience skills such as humour, goal-setting and persistence. So, parents need to look for as many opportunities as possible to spend time with and talk to their kids.
Kids also learn optimism from home. Martin Seligman, author of The Optimistic Child, found that kids pick up the explanatory style of the parent they spend most time around, usually mothers, by the age of eight. If that parent tends to be optimistic, it’s likely the child will be too. In other words, a ‘can do’ attitude pays off.
Promoting resilience in kids is a not a single event but a continual process. It requires parents, teachers and other adults to look for opportunities for kids to stretch themselves socially, academically and even emotionally.
Julianne Price
Student Wellbeing /Student Services Leader
Ph. 96992928