Wellbeing

Resilience and your child

As you will be aware this year at BPPS we have been utilising the PIVOT PL software to help monitor student wellbeing trends and address needs of individuals and cohorts of students. This week's edition focuses on resilience in your child, how it can impact their learning and how to help children build resilience.

What is resilience?

Resilience is part of emotional wellbeing and involves students being able to maintain or return to a state of positive mental health when faced with challenge or adversity. Resilience is important because it helps students to adapt in difficult situations and bounce back to ‘normal’ after experiencing trouble or hardship. 

Resilience can support students in many ways, with students who demonstrate aspects of resilience, such as optimism and growth mindset, being less likely to suffer from depression, anxiety and stress. Resilience is important in supporting students to achieve greater academic outcomes. Resilient students are more likely to positively manage transitions across stages of schooling and academic challenges whilst also developing greater self-motivation and persistence in their learning. 

All of these skills are not only important while at school, but also lay the foundations for later academic and career success.

How do I help my child develop greater resilience?

We all want our children to be happy, healthy kids who have a positive outlook and can deal with adversity effectively, but as parents how do we best support this?

Parents can build children’s resilience by providing opportunities for children to develop the skills, habits and attitudes that help build resilience. 

These include: 

• coping skills 

• positive thinking 

• self-confidence. 

What can families  do for children dealing with adversity? 

• Let children experience their emotions – acknowledge how they feel, help them put words to feelings. 

• Take time to listen attentively when children speak about what worries them. 

• When children experience a difficult situation, ask them how they would like you to support them. 

• Help children develop strategies to deal with difficult situations and encourage them to come up with their own solutions. 

• It can be helpful to encourage children to experience failure rather than protect them from it. When they do fail at something, help them put the failure into perspective. 

• Suggest more helpful self-talk if your child is talking negatively – for example, if your child says, “I’m going to die of embarrassment speaking in front of my class”, help them reframe it to something like, “Public speaking isn’t my favourite thing, but I’ll be able to cope”.

Other ways families can promote resilience

Role model 

• Try to role model healthy thinking when facing challenges of your own. You can do this by thanking other people for their support, and saying, “Things will get better soon and I can cope with this”. This shows that you expect that good things are possible. 

• Model calm and rational problem-solving with the other adults in your life. This teaches children what problem-solving looks like. It also teaches them that problems and issues can be worked through in a calm and rational way.

Talk about it 

• Your child is more likely to feel positive if he or she can see that difficult times are a part of life, that they’ll pass, and that things will get better. You might be able to help your child with this by talking about how you, people you know, or even famous people have gone through difficult times. 

• Use role-plays and have discussions to practice how to handle difficult situations. 

• Have positive conversations with each other, for example: “What’s the best thing that happened today?” or “What was something that did not go well today?”

Have a go 

• Encourage a ‘have a go’ attitude by listening and validating children’s concerns while encouraging problem-solving and help-seeking when necessary. 

• Allow for age-appropriate risk-taking and experimentation by children.

Keep things on track 

• Set up and stick to family routines. These can relate to eating, sleeping, family activities and rituals. Routines help things flow more smoothly, for example having a clear routine for each morning before school. 

• Encourage healthy exercise and activities.

Connect 

• Do things as a family that you enjoy, for example taking walks or watching your favourite movies together. 

• Help children connect to the people and history in their families. Tell stories from the past about family members or go over some good memories by looking through photographs. 

• Encourage children to connect to community through simple things like participating in community events, working bees etc.

Talk to your child about resilience

These conversation starters may help to initiate family discussion around this topic:

• What does resilience mean to you? 

• Do you think you’re a resilient person? 

• What do you think you could do to improve your resilience? 

• What advice would you give someone who struggles to bounce back from challenges?

I hope that some of these ideas resonate, either as established behaviours in your household or as some new strategies that might work for your family.

In wellness,

Nick King