It’s happened before, and there I was watching it happen again: watching my timid 4-year-old build up the courage to go “make a new friend” and watch him get rejected.
I asked him if I could play too but he said I couldn’t play with them.
My heart legit sank to the pit of my stomach. I wanted to crawl into the slide behind me and just stay there until everyone was gone from the park. Lucky for me this one of my three boys is the one who lets things just roll off his back. No fuss, really. But in that moment I realized a lot about not only him but his older brother and myself as a mom.
How can I raise resilient kids when I don’t even consider myself a resilient adult?
Sure we all have those moments when wanting to curl up in the fetal position and sink away for a bit would feel perfect. Or maybe that’s just my introvert showing, but I needed to start nipping this situation in the bud because his older brother was following in my footsteps and at least with him and baby brother I may still have a chance at redeeming myself.
In order to figure out where I was going, I needed to see where I had been. I thought back to when I was a kid and how my parents handled certain situations with me. I also went back some seven and eight years when my oldest was just figuring out the world around him and pinpointed some mistakes I can now CLEARLY see that I had made.
Let Them Figure It Out
Sometimes it’s best to just answer with “I don’t know.” or “How can we come up with this together?” This will get their brains thinking of how to handle challenging situations. Not answering their EVERY question will help them accept uncertainty and allow them to figure it out.
Teach them to be Problem-Solvers
Something I used to implement in my classroom had completely bypassed my own home life. This goes hand-in-hand with my last point. I always wanted to come swooping in and to the rescue but I learned that in order for them to start feeling confident in the choices they made they’d have to come up with a solution on their own. If they are nervous about something (and sometimes I’m nervous about it too- I just keep a poker face) I start inquiring about what they’ll do to solve this problem so that they aren’t so nervous.
For example, my oldest is nervous about spending three nights away at camp so we talked about some things that might help shakes those nerves. He came up with 1) focus on all the fun he’ll have 2) realize 3 nights/4 days is really a short period of time and 3) stay busy so that the time goes by quickly. In turn, I’ll think of a few ways to handle my momma nerves.
Let Them Make Mistakes.
Failure is a part of life. Yes, even winners had to fail in order to make it as far as they did. Here’s where I used to cringe because I didn’t want to see them get disappointed at the outcome. But as time progressed I began to see that their mistakes were a blessing as they had something to improve upon for the next time around. More than anything, though, it was a chance for them to see where they went wrong the first or second or twentieth time and gain confidence in themselves.
Teaching my kids to be resilient is something I still don’t claim to have mastered but I’m a work in progress. More often than not their actions help me become a more resilient adult. I sometimes feel like I’m learning right along with them. Scary? Yes. No one hands over the guide on good parenting/momming 101 and even if they did it would be a living document, changing and updating ever so often.
Comment below and let us know what strategies you have that to raise resilient kids?
