What Truly Makes Children Resilient
Spoiler alert: It’s not toughening up or “pushing to potential”
What is resilience?
The definition of resilience is the capacity to withstand or to recover quickly from difficulties.
When you think about having the capacity to tackle challenges skillfully, what conditions allow you to remain (relatively) calm and clear-headed, rather than losing your cool?
I can tell you, anecdotally (with extensive evidence to explain why), someone trying to push me beyond my present capacity will only make things worse for all of us.
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A short story
I’m in my early twenties, my (now) husband and I are on a day-long white-water rafting trip with some friends.
Along the way we stop for lunch and some cliff-diving. I figure I’d just battled white water rapids all morning, jumping off a cliff should be no problem.
And then I reach the top.
A normal amount of fear or anxiety when standing at the top of a cliff, looking down at water with a fast current is arguably rather healthy. My natural self-preservation instincts kick in and I hesitate.
I know it is safe, many people have already jumped, and I’m a good swimmer. I want to do it, I’m quite certain I will enjoy it once I do, but now I’m scared.
The group cheers me on and begins counting down from five. 5… 4… 3… 2.. 1.. and I go for it, I jump! I love it and quickly line up to go again.
This is an example of pushing someone within reasonable limits, when they are feeling anxious, but safe enough to take a (in this case, very literal) “leap of faith”, as they say.
A short story with a very different ending
My son is six years old, in grade one. He’s been asked to do a relatively lengthy writing exercise. By this time, he’s been diagnosed with ADHD and is suspected to also have dysgraphia (which impacts the skillset necessary for writing).
When he is resistant to completing the assignment, the teacher decides this is a good time to “push to potential”, encouraging him to give it a try, while not providing any further support or accommodations to help him be successful.
When he continues to refuse, she becomes more rigid, insisting that he do what is being demanded of him. At this point, he rips up his paper and hides under his desk.
When I’m contacted about this, I’m told by the teacher they “didn’t understand” where this came from, there were apparently no discernible antecedents to my son’s behaviour.
How can we expect children to learn flexibility if we are so rigid that we cannot show empathy and compassion to a six year old who is clearly struggling? If we are so rigid that we cannot, perhaps, adapt the assignment to be more in line with a child’s current capacity?
For example, they could have scribed my son’s main point, and then asked him to write a sentence or two himself to expand.
As I reminded them, they could have broken the assignment down into more manageable parts, so he felt less overwhelmed by the volume of writing he was being asked to do all at once.
They could have done a lot of things.
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