Wellbeing

Resilience: what is it?

Resilience refers to the ability to manage everyday stressors and challenges. Resilience enables people to shift back along the mental health continuum towards good mental health. A child's ability to be resilient can depend upon many things and can change depending upon their situation. Importantly, specific situations or events that one child or young person may find challenging, another may not.

Resilience: why is it important?

Resilience has been associated with better academic performance and behaviour and, longer-term, is associated with greater life opportunities (including employment and satisfying relationships). Children and young people with greater levels of resilience are better able to manage stress. 

When children overcome setbacks and problems, it builds their confidence and helps them feel more capable the next time a problem comes up.

Resilient children are often good at solving problems and learning new skills. This is because they’re more willing to try again even if things don’t go the way they want the first time.

And when things don’t go well and children feel anxious, sad, disappointed, afraid or frustrated, resilience helps them understand that these uncomfortable emotions usually don’t last forever. They can experience these emotions and know they’ll be OK before too long.

Resilient children are less likely to avoid problems or deal with them in unhealthy ways. Resilient children are also likely to have better physical and mental health than children who struggle to be resilient.

Building resilience in children

Children learn resilience through experience. Each time your child overcomes a problem, it builds their confidence in their ability to handle the next challenge.

Here are some ways you can build your child’s resilience:

• Support your child but try not to solve every minor problem or disappointment. For example, if your child didn’t get what they want for their birthday, you could talk about how they feel instead of trying to fix the problem.
• Avoid predicting and preventing problems for your child. This might mean letting your child hand in homework that’s wrong or not replacing a broken toy. Overcoming small challenges builds your child’s resilience for bigger setbacks.
• Help your child to identify and manage strong emotions. For example, your child might be worried about a family member who’s sick. You could say, ‘I can see you’re really worried about Grandpa. It’s OK to be worried but remember we’re doing everything we can to help him get better’.
• Encourage your child to have another go when things don’t work out the first time they try something. Praise your child for trying, no matter the result. 
• Build your child’s self-compassion. Self-compassion helps your child deal with disappointment, failures or mistakes by being kind to themselves. In turn, this helps them to move on from difficult experiences.
• Make it a habit to recognise and acknowledge when things are going well. For example, during family meals you could each share one positive thing from your day.

-Raising Children Network, Be You

Some book ideas about resilience that you might like to read across all ages...

Sites you might like to visit for practical ideas and further information:

Building Resilience in Kids | Parentline

How To Raise Resilient Children Who Never Give Up | Big Life Journal

How to Build Resilience in Children and Teens | Big Life Journal

Resources...

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