How well does your child deal with adversity, cope in difficult situations, become stronger after disappointments? In other words, how resilient is she? We often think that our job is to protect our children from the tough situations of life, but in fact, our protection helps only us. We don’t want to hear their anger, experience their sadness, or deal with their disappointment. In many cases, we were not allowed those feelings so we don’t know how to allow our children to have them. They may frighten us—so we make sure they don’t have them. When we prevent these experiences, we diminish their resilience, their ability to cope with life’s inevitable frustrations and situations beyond their control.
Building resilience in children requires that we:
- Trust our child’s ability to handle difficult problems
- Convey in words and body language confidence in their ability to cope
- Allow and accept their feelings of sadness, fear, anger, disappointment over situations they cannot change
- Do not jump in to rescue them or fix situations that cause their frustration in order to avoid our own fears
I don’t have a lot of faith in most bullying programs in schools. Mainly because they focus on the children and not the families. I believe a lot of bullying is generated in homes where bullying occurs. We don’t realize it because bullying is part of our traditional parenting methods. We punish and threaten children to get them to do what we want. Isn’t that bullying? To many children it feels that way—somebody bigger and more powerful telling me what to do or else. When parents find out their child is bullying at school, what is the typical outcome? That child will be yelled at, lectured to, punished in some way—in other words, bullied. Bullying is an everyday occurrence in most homes. It’s a wonder we don’t have more bullies.