Okay, resilience! Let’s talk about it.

As one of our HERRRby values, resilience is central to helping students become well-rounded individuals who can face challenges with confidence. It’s also something that I think about a lot.

Resilience can mean different things to different people, which makes it both interesting and tricky to define. Some think of it as something we either have or don’t: a fixed trait. But research shows that resilience is developable; it can be nurtured, stretched, and strengthened over time.

A common idea is that resilience is simply the ability to “bounce back” from challenges. That’s true, but it’s not the full picture. Resilience is also about adaptability — the ability to be flexible in our thoughts, feelings, and behaviours in response to difficulty. It’s about learning and growing from challenges, becoming stronger, wiser, and more capable as a result.

In short, resilience is the capacity not just to cope with adversity or ‘bounce back’, but to propel forward with new skills, perspectives, and confidence.

By understanding resilience as a set of skills and attitudes that can be developed, both at school and at home, we can support children to face challenges with courage, learn from setbacks, and thrive in life.

With that in mind, there’s a few factors that influence the development of resilience:

1. Supportive, secure relationships and community

A significant factor in a child overcoming hardship and doing well in life is the support of at least one stable, committed caregiver/parent or adult. These relationships can provide personalised responses and scaffolding for children and help teach them how to manage challenges. These relationships are important for modelling to children how to adapt and change, and give them the skills they need to thrive. The stronger the relationships with the adults in their lives and community, the more likely they are to do well in the face of hardship. https://developingchild.harvard.edu/resources/inbriefs/inbrief-the-science-of-resilience/

2. Positive experiences of stress and challenge

Stress is something that we will all be exposed to, and there are varied levels of stress that children will need to learn to overcome. When children are exposed to “good” or “managable” kinds of stress like studying for a test, or learning to persevere with putting their bag away, making new friends or sitting with a problem and trying to solve it, are really healthy for a child’s development. This helps them learn to manage challenges in the future, and provides them with levels of self-efficacy – it helps them develop the belief that they have the capacity to tackle challenges. It helps them to know that they themselves have the tools, strengths and knowledge to complete tasks and things that are tricky. This in turn helps build their resilience because they know they have the capability to manage and adapt to challenging situations. (https://vimeo.com/112360818?fl=pl&fe=vl)

3. Social and emotional skills

Teaching children to be emotionally aware, reflect on their emotions, provided with skills to self-regulate their emotions are more likely to have higher levels of resilience. Teaching children strategies for managing their emotions, and increasing their vocabulary of emotions improves their resilience outcomes.

School, particularly the early years of schooling, is such a perfect opportunity to develop resilience. There are so many opportunities that can be built into the morning routine that enable and support the development of resilience. Some ideas might include:

Encouraging independence, responsibility and taking manageable risks where possible like pouring the milk for their cereal, packing their lunch box (or participating in packing it), packing their bag, carrying their own bag, putting their bag in the car, walking into school by themselves, getting their reading books out etc,. The key here is to then let them experience the consequences of not getting it right, which then enables you to…
Model healthy coping. The way you respond to, navigate and talk about the consequences or negative results sets the example of how they can and will respond to the situation in the future.
Be supportive and encouraging at the fact that they’ve tried to accomplish something on their own. You can then model to them how to correct their errors, and let them have another go the next time around. Persevering with independence and responsibility is a massive opportunity to foster resilience and self-efficacy.
Discuss times that they’ve demonstrated resilience. Children naturally show forms of resilience every day, from being flexible with routines or food selections, to changing their approach to solving a problem (typically when playing in the early years), and when you make it clear that their actions were demonstrating resilience, this helps make the connection explicit and helps them to foster the belief that they are, in fact, resilient in lots of ways already.

Resilience is a lifelong skill, value and attitude that fluctuates over time. But, it can be developed the same as other skills like kicking a ball, or handwriting, or reading.

By finding opportunities for your child to experience safe levels of struggle, challenge and then consequence, it helps them build their levels of resilience. This is supported by your own modelling and expression of social and emotional skills, and their relationships with the adults in their lives who can provide adequate support.

Tyler

If you’re interested in learning more, here’s some great resources

https://developingchild.harvard.edu/resources/podcasts/podcast-resilience-play/

https://positivepsychology.com/what-is-resilience/

https://parentingideas.com.au/parents/resilience/

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