Helping your child become more resilient is an important way to help them cope with life’s challenges and adapt to new situations. If you encourage your child to have a resilient attitude, they will likely be more confident when dealing with uncertain circumstances or hardships. With that said, you’re probably wondering what you can do to help foster a sense of resilience. Read on for some advice from a UK boarding school…
Teach Your Child What Resilience Means
Explain to your child that being resilient is all about the ability to recover from challenges and not letting them get you down. Explore some examples with them. For example, if they fail a test at school, explain to them that there will always be an opportunity to perform better in the next test or piece of schoolwork, as failing only helps us learn from our mistakes. Teach them that even adults make mistakes, but our abilities improve with time and practice.
Take a Positive Approach
There’s no denying that life can be frustrating at times, and it can be hard to maintain a positive approach. You might have an afternoon at the park planned with your family and then half an hour before you’re due to leave it starts tipping out down. You might have to spend this year’s holiday budget on a new car because your old one has decided it doesn’t want to work anymore. If you want to raise a resilient child, you should try not to grumble about such things in front of your child because this will teach them the wrong way to respond to certain situations. Instead, always try to put a positive spin on things. For example, if the rain ruins your plans, you could say something like “Never mind, we’ll have to have a movie day with popcorn and hot chocolate, which will be just as fun!”.
Help Your Child with their Confidence
Confidence and resilience go hand in hand. If your child doesn’t believe in themselves, they will find it difficult to bounce back from difficult situations. Help them become more confident by giving them various responsibilities around the house, praising them when they complete these tasks, and showing them that you trust them and have faith in their abilities. You should also encourage them to join an extra-curricular club, where they will develop a range of key skills and build relationships that will help improve their self-esteem.
Teach Your Child How to Manage their Emotions
If your child has some constructive ways to handle their emotions, they will be better at coping with difficulties. For instance, if you are playing a board game as a family and they are getting grouchy because they’re losing, say something like “I can see that you’re getting a little bit frustrated with this game so why don’t you go and take a little breather in another room, and we can come back to it later?”. In theory, this should prevent them from throwing a paddy and essentially displaying their emotions in a bad way, which will only put them off playing the same board game again in the future.
