Real Schools
Restorative Practices at BNPS
Raising a Resilient Child
Shelia Bollard, Real Schools.
August 2024
It was great to have a representative of our parents attend our parent session on August 13th. Shelia presented an informative session, sharing some knowledge and understanding of resilience and practical strategies to help us with our young people. Above is a slide from the presentation. In the newsletter (each fortnight), we will share more information and resources to understand the keys to building resilience.
First is GRIT and the importance of allowing our children to experience productive struggle. As busy parents, we sometimes take away opportunities for children to experience this because it’s quicker or easier if we do things ourselves. We also remove productive struggle because it is hard for our children and we don’t want them to be upset or disappointed by hard things or outcomes that are not ‘perfect’.
Productive struggle can involve situations when the child isn’t getting the outcome they want the first time, such as learning to pack their school bag or turning a jumper in the right way. Other examples can be not winning the card game they are playing with their siblings or getting into the sports team they tried out for. It can sometimes feel easier (or better) to step in and attempt to ‘fix’ these situations for our children, but letting them feel the ‘hard moment’ and supporting them to have success is more beneficial in the long run.
Experiencing success after a struggle is rewarding and this is what Shelia called building ‘Grit’: The desire, skills and willingness to work through the hard feelings that sometimes come with a challenge.
Some ways to support children with this is to talk to your children about feelings of challenge and disappointment and how you personally handle these feelings. As parents it is easy to want to protect our children from difficult feelings, like disappointment, but helping them experience them and handle them in a supported way is a key to fostering resilience.
Click here to learn more about productive struggle