Raising Resilient Kids

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The last couple of weeks we have been talking about the idea of resilience – being able to “bounce back” from difficult times, setbacks, and other significant challenges. We have learned that it is a key characteristic found in “successful” people and is an important part of handling all that life “shoots” at a person. We have also clarified that resilience is not a trait that people either have or do not have. It instead involves behaviors, thoughts, and actions that can be learned and developed.

As parents, our natural reaction to this information is that we want to make sure our kids learn to be resilient. So how do we do that? How do we “create” resilient kids? Well, as with so many other things in life, it is not easy, especially for our generation of parents. The scary thing, as I have been doing some reading and research, is how much current parenting trends and behaviors actually inhibit or discourage the development of resilience in our kids. In this age of hyper and helicoptering parenting, we are possibly raising a generation of kids who will have very little resilience.

Here is a paraphrased list of steps taken from an article on the Internet about how to foster resilience in your children. As with many of the other things I have written about this year, the first step we can take is to learn more about it. There are many articles on the Internet and a number of books you can buy that will give you very specific and detailed ideas on raising resilient kids.

  • Don’t Accommodate Every Need: Kids cannot develop resilience if their every need or want is met constantly by parents. You can’t learn to bounce back if there is always someone eliminating all the setbacks and difficulties in your life.
  • Avoid Eliminating All Risk: When we take away every risk because of our fears for our children, we are simply removing all the opportunities for our kids to learn resilience.
  • Teach Them to Problem-solve: When your child faces a challenge, don’t solve it for them, but instead help them problem-solve ideas to handle the difficulty they are facing.
  • Don’t Provide All the Answers. Our children need to gain confidence that they can solve their own problems and find their own answers.
  • Let Your Kids Make Mistakes. This is probably the hardest one for parents. You have to let your children face failure from time to time. Without facing some adversity and setback in life, they cannot learn to build the resiliency muscles they will need as adults.
  • Model Resiliency. Our children learn from watching us. Show them how to handle setbacks and deal with problems in life.
DB Admin December 4th, 2015 0 comments Blog

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Dalat Director

Karl Steinkamp is passionate about Dalat International School and training up young people to make a positive impact on their world, walk with integrity, and follow Christ. Karl was a student at Dalat and returned with a degree in education as a student teacher, high school principal, and now Dalat Director since 2006.

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