Tips to Raising Resilient Children
Children’s brains create thousands of neural pathways at any given moment, taking in huge amounts of information from their surrounding environment. These neural pathways are “roads” to and from a person’s nervous system. The nervous system is the body's communication system that controls much of what your body does. It allows you to do things like walk, speak, swallow, breathe, learn, and controls how your body reacts in an emergency. Resilience is the key to controlling and regulating your nervous system in a way that is beneficial and most helpful to you.
Teach Problem-Solving Skills
Problem-solving abilities live in the prefrontal cortex section of the brain. Sometimes children might get angry, frustrated, or agitated when they don’t quite understand how to solve a problem. A good tip during this time would be to allow the child to take a break, step away, and calm down. Just like adults, sometimes children also need to take a break from a particularly frustrating situation in order to give their brain a rest and allow for creativity to spark a solution. Giving the child the reassurance that they are in control can keep them from feeling overwhelmed when they hit a metaphorical road-block, and also allows them to practice emotional regulation.
Teach Emotional Regulation & Coping Skills
Emotions show how our mind processes a situation using different clues. Emotions (feelings such as happiness, sadness, fear, anger, or joy) are caused by situations that are meaningful or important to you, and are something you feel or show through your body language. Within a split second, you make a choice about which emotion you find important and which emotion you choose to control or suppress completely. Being able to do so is through a process called “emotion regulation”. This is the process of adjusting, controlling, and adapting your feelings, depending on the background of a situation. Unfortunately, when you repress emotion, those emotions are no longer under conscious control, meaning the emotions can pop back up unwarranted, causing a child to throw a tantrum or fit. Ways to practice these skills include: model healthy emotional self-management by resisting our own little "tantrums" such as yelling; guide behavior but resist the urge to punish; and helping your child feel safe enough to feel their emotions, even while you limit their actions.
Modeling Behavior
Everyone has what is called ‘mirror neurons’, neurons in the brain that take in information from your senses: see, hear, taste, smell, and touch. Mirror neurons are special, in that they allow us to learn through imitation. They enable us to reflect body language, facial expressions, and emotions - kind of like “monkey see, monkey do”. Children are constantly intaking information through the world around them. Though no one is essentially perfect, keep in mind that your children watch your behavior, pick up on it, and possibly mirror it later on. That being said, modeling healthy ways of coping with “slipping up” or doing something wrong can also be useful for a child learning how to accept when something bad has happened, consequences, and knowing they always have the ability to learn from mistakes.
Additional Resources:
https://www.apa.org/helpcenter/resilience
https://kids.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/frym.2016.00016
https://www.canr.msu.edu/news/monkey_see_monkey_do_model_behavior_in_early_childhood
-Sarah Rabstejnek