Positive Education
Lynda Hewitt
Building resilience in our children
One of the most common things discussed amongst educators and employers at the moment is that young people lack resilience, many are not to overcome adversities in their lives which leaves them ill-equipped to deal with adulthood and the challenges they will inevitably face in relationships, social situations and in their employment journey.
As educators we strive to develop resilience in our students, we encourage them to speak to us if they are feeling challenged so we can support them. Much of this does not involve removing the challenge altogether, but working with the student on developing strategies to overcome them.
Many of us educators are also parents, aunts, uncles, even grandparents and completely understand how hard it is to see your child struggle and the need to do anything and everything to make life easier for them, to take those obstacles and adversities away so that our child can be happy, but are we doing them a disservice by doing this? Are we sending them out to school, to adulthood unprepared to cope when life becomes hard, thus resulting in them suffering from anxiety and poor mental health? Should we be allowing our children to fail, to overcome the difficulties themselves by providing them with a toolbox of skills they can continue to use throughout their lives and thereby empowering them?
As an educator and parent, myself I never feel I have perfected either role. At times of frustration I have to remind myself that parenting is a ‘career’ too. Like any career I need to reflect on my practices and at times upskill. I look at the long game; I want my children to be independent thinkers with good problem-solving skills so they have a better chance of succeeding in life, but how do I achieve this? Instant gratification is the easiest option, make life smooth for them, but delayed gratification is the more sustainable one for both them and myself, and for this reason I read articles on parenting, I research and I use the resilience I learnt as a child to hold my own when my children kick back as they inevitably want the easy route. I fail often. Children are fierce and at times scary. There is also not a ‘one size fits all’ approach, but with constant work, the support of family, community and schools all working together, I believe that I can be a better parent and as I work with young people, it helps me in my role as an educator too. The ultimate goal is to develop a generation of young individuals well equipped to cope with life and all it has to offer.
Below are some links to articles that are well worth reading: