RESILIENCE
What is Resilience?
Resilience is when people have positive outcomes despite negative experiences. The idea that resilience is “toughness” or “grit” is a harmful myth. No one is invincible, and nobody builds resilience alone.
Resilience is like a scale balancing positive and negative experiences
The resilience scale is a metaphor to explain why some children seem more resilient than others and to help visualize how parents and caring adults can improve resilience in children.
Think of a scale where a child or youth’s good and bad experiences get stacked over the course of their development. What happens in early childhood is especially important.
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One side of the scale is loaded with bad experiences that cause Toxic Stress and tip the scale in a negative direction.
Examples:
- Separation from a parent through divorce, death, incarceration or deportation
- Under-resourced schools, libraries and parks
- Racial oppression and violence
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Positive experiences (protective factors) are stacked on the other side: things like responsive caregivers and available resources in the community like health care, high-quality child care and enrichment activities for teens.
Examples:
- Learning to manage strong emotions.
- Safe, affordable, healthy food and water.
- Affirming faith or cultural practices.
A child’s resilience scale is a good predictor of health outcomes, with early childhood experiences weighing heavily. The scale tips in a positive direction when the scale is loaded with positive experiences and the child is more likely to experience good health, strong relationships and do well in school.
A child weighed down by experiences that cause toxic stress will have an increased risk for anxiety, depression, substance use, and school failure. Many of these negative outcomes begin in adolescence and adulthood, long after the resilience scale was negatively loaded in early childhood.
But, with the right support, we can all help each other manage these stressors.
Keep Learning
Watch this video from the Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University about the science of resilience.
How to build resilience
Children aren’t born with or without resilience. With the support of the adults in their lives, every child can develop the skills for resilience.
Adults can build resilience in children by:
- Creating safe, stable, nurturing environments rich in serve-and-return interactions (back-and-forth conversations and play) and
- By preventing experiences that cause toxic stress.
The single most important factor in child resilience is having at least one stable and committed adult who they can lean on. It can be a parent, a family member, or another caring adult in the community.
Resilience can be nurtured by teaching life skills like managing strong emotions, solving problems effectively, and connecting with others emotionally.
Because life has its ups and downs, resilience is not a static quality. There might be times when adversity overloads a person’s ability to cope. With support, however, resilience can be built in even the most difficult circumstances.
Get Involved: You Play A Larger Role
Some factors that are key to building resilience and tipping the scale in a positive direction are out of an individual parent’s control, including safety in schools and communities, poverty, availability of healthy foods and equitable resource allocation.
That’s why it’s critical you connect with organizations like 211 to get connected to essential resources like food and housing. You can take action to build resilience for children in your community by both getting connected to essential resources in the 211 database, like food and housing, and ensuring all resources in your community are listed in the 211 database and accessible to your neighbors.
If you see an unmet need, advocate for additional resources to build strong brains and resilience in children. Talk to community leaders or join Maryland Essentials for Childhood to take collective action.
We must all work together to ensure children have these important keys to healthy development and resilience.
Bring a screening of the film, Resilience, to your community. Watch this short clip.
Resilience skills
Building resilience requires supportive relationships and environments. The child should feel a sense of safety at home, school and community.
When building resiliency, focus on these 6 core characteristics and skills for resiliency:
1. Sense of Competency
2. Care & Respect of Self and Others
3. Problem Solving & Coping Skills
4. Optimism and Hope for the Future
5. Ability to Reframe Stress
6. Sense of Purpose and Meaning
Resilience Skills By Age
These skills can be seen in children at various stages of development. Dig deeper with a poster from the Maryland Department of Health, Behavioral Health Administrations Resilience Committee to learn what resilience looks like in children in each age group.
You can also try these ways to establish these six core characteristics and skills:
Be a model and mentor of resilience
by tapping into resources like Mind Resilience, sponsored by the Maryland Department of Health. It has tools and activities to help you build resilience as an individual, educator or organization.
Develop a community support system
of friends, families, educators, faith leaders and service providers.
Be a safe, stable, and nurturing presence in your child’s life
by providing love, affection, attention and clear limit-setting. Spending time together builds strong life-long relationship with your child.
Help your child build and nurture healthy relationships
with peers, extended family members and trusted adults, like mentors, teachers and coaches.
Use available community resources for things like food, housing, and child care
to help buffer the negative consequences of daily life.
Help the child regulate their emotions with self-regulation
and develop problem-solving and coping skills (executive function and self-regulation).
Help the child develop a sense of self-efficacy
by encouraging them to try new things and persevere in the face of difficulties.
Help the child develop a sense of meaning in his life
by imparting spiritual or cultural beliefs, providing opportunities to develop relationships and asking your child about their dreams.
Encourage the development of talents or skills
This will help your child develop a sense of competency by trying new things and persisting in new challenges.
Volunteer together with the child to help others
This helps build the child’s care and respect for self and others.
Nurture a sense of optimism and hope in your child
Use humor, creativity and exploration to face tough times.
Want more ideas?
Watch things that build resilience in kids by Maggie Dent.
How To Help Kids Deal with Life's Ups and Downs
In times of crisis, we can also help our children learn resilience skills. Read critical ways to support your child during a personal or national crisis from the American Academy of Pediatrics.
Sometimes, building those skills means letting children pave their own path. It’s a balancing act. Parents and caregivers don’t have to always be “fixers.”
Let children lead the conversation too. Listen to what kids are saying they need from grown-ups to deal with live's ups and downs.