I was at an introductory meeting for parents at a school the other day. One of the speakers spoke to us about students and how to best prepare them to be able to do well. She said that research indicates that the number one predictive factor of academic success is the level of resilience in a student.
That makes developing resiliency in a child vitally important.
One of the ways that children learn how to be resilient is to be exposed to others living with resilience.
Gulp.
That puts a responsibility on us as adults in environments where students are to model and demonstrate resilience.
I really liked how this video lays out strategies to help children cope with the fact that
- they will make mistakes,
- live in a world that isn’t fair, and generally
- be able to absorb the inevitable big and little disappointments of life.
Resilience is the ability to “bounce back” from the hard things in life, not by ignoring or denying them, but by seeing them in the larger context. That’s something that most grownups are still working on.
One of my junior tribe members, who is well aware his mother is a therapist, and is bright enough to attempt to work this to his advantage, asked me if he do something last week. I said, “Nope”…he continued to try to get me to change my mind. One of his arguements was that I was “bubble wrapping his soul”.
Talk about laying it on thick. He could hear his own plaintive argument, and started to smirk…couldn’t keep a straight face with this blatant attempt to play on my therapist’s soul…to remind me I shouldn’t protect him from life, that my goal is to let him experience life in the fullest…even if my own preference would be to protect him.
I didn’t protect him. I said no…and he had to deal with his disappointment.
That resilience thing is hard for all of us…but it’s something we all benefit from working on.
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