Student Wellbeing

Resilience

Last week our Year 5 and 6 students spent the week in Canberra. For many students, this was the first time they had been away from home for an extended period. All of our students showed a great deal of Resilience. Resilience is defined as the ability to bounce back from adversity. It is a necessary skill for coping with the ups and downs of life and one of the key ingredients of success. Several things impact a person’s resilience, including their previous experiences, their sense of self, the coping strategies they have developed over time and their mindset.

Resilience is directly related to wellbeing; it is about having the ability to cope with and adapt to new situations. Being resilient and positive, with a sense of wellbeing, enables a person to approach other people and situations with confidence and optimism. This mindset is especially important for students given the enormous changes and challenges they face throughout adolescence.

By helping children develop the skills to build resilience and a growth mindset, we can minimise the effects of negative, stressful situations. These skills allow children to face challenges, learn from them, and develop ways to live a happy and healthy life.

As adults, we need to teach our children that resilience means bouncing back when things in life might be difficult or tough and give them the strategies that they can use to build resilience to face life’s difficulties in a healthy way.  One way is to be physically healthy by eating fruits, vegetables and drinking lots of water, and exercising and getting fresh air.  The other way is to look for the positive things in each situation and talk about how every cloud has a silver lining.  Resilience is such an important skill for our children to learn early in life, as it can help them resist peer pressure, and help them cope with life’s problems.  There are lots of ways that parents and educators can help teach our kids the life-saving skill of resilience.