Imagine these scenarios:
- Your teenage daughter comes home in what you perceive as deep distress. The cause: Her best friend has defected to a rival group and is exhibiting disdain.
- Your teenage son, who has been practicing for months for a place on the varsity soccer team, has just learned he won’t make the team.
- Your ninth grader has studied hard for his American History final, but instead of getting the ‘A’ he needed to advance to the school’s AP program, he gets an entirely unexpected ‘B .’His hopes for getting into the program are dashed for another school year.
These are not uncommon scenarios confronting parents: your kids are suffering, and you feel helpless. Mainly you want to relieve their suffering, so your inclination is to step in and solve their problem–even though you know you can’t. Worse, teenagers are famously reluctant to admit weakness, and because they have an outsized need for privacy, they will likely decline to share the details with you. So you can only hope that they can bounce back from their distress and carry on.
Resilience is often defined as the ability to overcome difficult circumstances, especially those you can’t control. It is that, but it involves more. Being resilient is also confidence that you can deal successfully with future challenges, no matter how daunting. In other words, without necessarily using the term, you hope they are resilient.
In the end, how challenges are handled determines how rewarding our lives will be– and even the lives of those close to us. Positively dealing with failure is important because disappointments and losses will always occur. Life is not fair. Learning to cope with inevitable adversity with confidence is a key marker of resilience.
The good news is that resilience is a skill that parents can model and teach their children. Krista Reuther, Assistant Director of Ohana Community Health and Prevention, who leads a team that periodically holds workshops on adolescent behavioral health (see note below), says, “While the goal of resilience is to face adversity successfully, it is also to learn about oneself and what works in dealing with it. For teenagers, resilience adds to self-confidence and awareness of what they can handle.” That confidence is at the core of managing life successfully.
How Parents Can Help Build Resilience
Helping to develop resilience in your children starts early with a loving relationship, providing a fund of support that children know they can count on. When that high level of trust is established, it is easier for them to talk about their problems, knowing they will be heard and not lectured. Like most of us, teenagers don’t want difficulties to be solved for them; they want the knowledge and confidence to solve those difficulties themselves. Ask yourself how you deal with problems that arise. Children, being acute observers of how parents react to adverse circumstances, are watching. Parents who address difficulties appropriate for family discussion by calmly talking them through, analyzing the key issues involved, then devising possible solutions serve as examples to kids of how they might address their challenges. It is a model they can emulate.
There are skills that experts counsel parents to encourage:
1. Self-compassion. Teenagers are often quick to blame themselves for setbacks, automatically reverting to an assumption that these setbacks are because of who they are–a person who falls short of their own expectations. A more productive view–and worthy of frequent messaging–is that sometimes bad things happen, and being kind to yourself when they do is much more helpful.
Self-compassion is a significant building block of resilience. It leads the ninth grader who didn’t do as well as he wanted on his history exam to tell himself that next time he will do better. Or the boy who didn’t make the soccer team being hopeful that he can make the team in the future if he works closely with the coach. They both recognize their sadness in not achieving their goals, but they don’t blame themselves for some deficiency that saps their sense of self.
2. Empathy. Quality relationships are built on empathy. Empathy is a quality that receives great appreciation from others, leading to a higher self-esteem level. It may be rare for teenagers to exhibit it unless they are encouraged to develop it, so modeling is important. The parent who contributes food for the disadvantaged, takes in pets who need homes, or spends time with an elderly neighbor provide an example that can be appreciated and emulated in a teenager’s life. Helping others is a mark of the ability to nurture strong relationships, and there is no group in greater need of strong relationships than teenagers.
3. Self-care. It may not seem obvious that being physically strong is essential to developing resilience, but inadequate sleep, poor nutrition, and lack of exercise can lead to negativity and even depression. Learning and maintaining good physical health habits in adolescence can serve one throughout life,. According to Krista Reuther, it is one of the most overlooked aspects of developing resilience.”Healthy bodies, as much as healthy habits of mind, are essential to resilience.”
4. Framing a positive view. Being positive does not mean ignoring reality–one cannot sugarcoat disappointment –but a positive outlook puts things in perspective–something teenagers often don’t know how to do. Optimistic people have been shown to live longer and maintain stronger relationships. This is especially especially important in adolescence when teens need those relationships to develop socially and emotionally.
5. Developing the ability to problem-solve. Talking through problems helps kids to see them more clearly and to arrive at solutions collaboratively. Sometimes teens can’t see beyond an immediate problem and may even need help discovering what is bothering them. The cause of their upset may not be immediately obvious, but they can take the lead in proposing solutions once identified. Self-confidence is reinforced when their own solution is successfully put into practice. At the same time, calling on teenagers to problem-solve signals that you trust them to manage their problems. This builds self-confidence,
There has been a significant increase in mental disorders between 2016 and 2020, and although Covid-19 has been named as a major factor, social media and its pressures are surely another. It has been reported that half of all lifetime mental disorders begin by age 14; one in four adolescents experience a mental health issue to the point of serious impairment. All of these challenges make developing a strong, loving relationship with your children imperative for their future well-being and your family dynamic in general. Recognizing how important the life-long skill of resilience is, now is the time to commit to the steps necessary to build it in your children.
As many have said, one’s reaction to adversity, not adversity itself, determines how one’s life story develops. The earlier one can learn resilience, the earlier that successful life story begins.
Susan Meister is a journalist, columnist, and community activist living in Pebble Beach. Susan’s writing was recognized with the 2020 Bronze Award for service writing from the Parenting Media Association.