Working to build resilience in children is important from the very beginning. As soon as your child is old enough to try, they’ll need resilience to maintain a positive outlook, adapt to change, cope with stress, maintain good mental health, and have the drive to learn, grow, and improve.
Winston Churchill famously said, “Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.” The idea is that growing, learning, and eventually succeeding in any endeavor requires initial failure. Whether you’re learning to walk, trying to memorize times tables, or trying out for your high school’s athletic program, the ability to fail, pick yourself up, and try again requires one key quality, resilience.
Children who learn resilience can recover and move forward from failures and challenges without feeling overwhelmed or dwelling on negative thoughts. As a parent or caregiver, you can help foster resilience in children by teaching problem-solving skills and supporting a growth mindset while modeling a healthy relationship with failure in your own life.
How to Teach Problem-Solving Skills
A major part of being resilient in the face of failure is the ability to solve problems. Every setback is an opportunity to teach your child invaluable problem-solving skills. You can help your child learn how to solve problems in a variety of ways.
Encourage Creativity
Provide your child with opportunities to be creative, come up with new ideas, and test those ideas. This process provides low-stakes opportunities for challenge, setback, and failure. When your child builds a pillow fort or a castle out of blocks, they will encounter challenges.
Practice Patience While Modeling Solution-Based Thinking
When your child experiences a challenge, don’t rush in to save the day — even if that’s your instinct. Give them time to try to come up with solutions on their own.
You can then model solution-based thinking to help them ask the questions that will lead them to the solutions. For example, “Why do you suppose the pillow fort collapsed?” or “How could you create a better support for your castle’s drawbridge.”
Talk About Solutions
Talk with your child about possible solutions. Ask them what their ideas are and provide some of your own to get the ball rolling. Then work through possible outcomes of these ideas.
Create Space for Failure
Do not prevent your child from failing. Doing so sends the message that failure is not okay, and it also prevents them from learning how to cope with failure and solve their own problems.
Focus on Effort, Not Results
When your child succeeds or fails, praise their effort and not the results they achieved. Of course, it’s okay to recognize accomplishments but place the emphasis for praise on the effort that went into the achievement.
Instead of praising the right answer, making the team, or producing a sturdy fort, praise how hard they worked to accomplish the goal. If they fail, you should still offer praise for their effort.
Fostering a Growth Mindset in Children
A growth mindset is essential to promoting resilience in children. The principle of a growth mindset is based on the truth that we have elastic brains that are able to grow, learn, and develop new habits. In other words, our talents and abilities are not fixed.
Teaching your child to view their efforts, failures, and successes from the perspective of a growth mindset will help them better accept failures and setbacks because they will understand that with persistence, practice, learning, and effort, they can accomplish anything.
You can help them practice living with a growth mindset by embracing the “power of yet.” Using the “power of yet” teaches children to reframe their failures through language. When you hear your child say something like, “I can’t rollerskate,” “I don’t understand algebra,” or “I’m not good enough to make varsity,” tell them to add the word “yet” to the end of those statements. This will help change a negative mindset to a growth mindset that offers a more positive outlook, views failures as learning opportunities, and motivates hard work and focus as methods for achievement.
We Can Help You Help Your Child Become More Resilient
Encouraging your children to take healthy risks is an important component of building resilience. However, if your child is struggling to develop skills for coping with failure and is experiencing prolonged distress, as a result, then seeking professional help from a pediatrician, counselor, educator, or therapist can help. If you have concerns about your child’s ability to cope with setbacks or have any questions about fostering resilience in children, please contact us.