Helping Your Child Build Resilience
Challenges, and sometimes traumas, are a part of life. When your child builds resilience, it makes their nervous system stronger and better able to weather the hard times. The wonderful news is that resilience skills can be learned by anyone, at any age (hint, hint, you can build resilience too)! To help your child build resilience, you want to offer loving support, teach them about caring for themselves with adequate time for rest, offer a consistent schedule, help them have a positive self-view and allow them to make mistakes and learn with you supporting and teaching them along the way.
To make it easier to help your child, I’ve put together seven tips for helping your child to build resilience.
Teach them to care for themselves with nourishing foods, moving their bodies daily, finding time to play, and allowing plenty of time for rest. Modeling this for yourself is the best way to teach your child to care for themselves. (Don’t forget to give yourself grace and compassion on days that you aren’t able to do this.
Create and maintain a predictable daily routine. This allows your child to find comfort and groundedness in the consistency. Include some unstructured time in your day as well, to rest or play. As parents, we know that there will need to be some flexibility in the daily routine but try your best to stay consistent.
Help your child find places to connect and engage with others. Humans are biologically wired to desire connection with others, it helps soothe us when we are in connected community. Helping others is a beautiful way to connect and it allows children to feel empowered.
Help your child to set realistic goals and support them as they take the steps needed to achieve them. Acknowledge and praise them for their hard work. Encourage them to stay optimistic and hopeful as they work toward their goal.
Allow your child to make mistakes. Offer your loving support as you let them know that they are not alone in making mistakes, as humans we are imperfect, and a failure shows that they had the courage to try. Teach them that we can learn deeply from the mistakes or failures. Trying takes bravery!
Nurture a positive self-view. Help them to remember the times they worked hard and made good decisions. Encourage them to trust themselves.
Teach your child to accept that change is inevitable. Change is part of life, and there is an opportunity for empowerment when we can choose to accept the change and focus on what we do have control over.