How To Build Resilience in Your Children

Hundreds of years ago, children had no option but to be resilient, otherwise they wouldn’t have survived. These days, life is certainly easier in that children often don’t have to worry about their next meal or whether they will catch an incurable disease, yet that doesn’t mean childhood is stress-free. 

We need to build resilience in our children so they feel confident in standing up to bullies, can adapt to change in their lives, navigate our busy world and develop the persistence to conquer any challenges they come across. 

But how can we do this? We’ve crafted a list of three ways you can foster resilience in your child while giving them a growth mindset.  

1. Don’t Give Them Everything They Want

It’s a parental instinct to make life as comfortable as possible for our children – but by doing this, we’re doing them a disservice. 

For example, if your six-year-old doesn’t want to sleep in their room and you make them a bed in your room, this isn’t doing them any favours. In the short-term, you might believe you are comforting your child, but in the long-term, you aren’t allowing them to build the resilience they need to sleep in their own room each night.  

2. Allow Your Child To Take Risks

It’s easy to want to run after your child while they’re in the playground to ensure you catch them if they fall – but they need to learn that it hurts when they fall. 

You can only build a resilient child if you allow them to take risks. Let them learn to ride a bike – yes, they will fall off, but it is teaching them road rules and valuable safety lessons they’ll need later in life when they are walking to school, or later still, when they get their driver’s license.  

3. Let Your Child Solve Their Own Problems

If your child is struggling with their homework, the simple solution would be to do it for them. But how is that teaching them anything? Instead, be there to ask questions and guide them by suggesting how they could solve the problems, while letting them do it in their own way. 

If they fail, they will learn a valuable lesson and it will help them to build up their resilience. 

Remember – we all want to make our children’s lives as stress-free as possible. But by limiting all challenges they face, they will not build up the necessary resilience they will need to tackle adulthood.