What is Resilience Education?

Often life proves that Kelly Clarkson was right.  “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger”, or at least carries the potential to do so.  Emotional resilience is leveraging adversity. It’s about how you view and respond to different situations.

Sometimes resilience is referred to as “grit”.  Other times, its used in place of perseverance.  Lets’s explore the definition and how you can build resilience in your life.

Emotional Resilience:  The ability to leverage adversity (or adversaries) for psychological growth.

How to build emotional resilience in children

There are two ways to build emotional resilience.

1. By going through adversity
2. Through education and the development of skills

Resilience is having the ability to push through a difficult situation. Kids deal with plenty of difficult situations while growing up. There’s always bullying, harassment, discrimination, and man-made disasters that can all have a huge effect on kids.  Some children are able to “roll with” challenges, seemingly unharmed while others experience significant disturbances.

So the question becomes, how do we build emotional resilience in kids? There are a number of ways to help kids grow in this area and take challenges head-on.

TEACH resiliency skills

Teaching children how to control their emotions, stay calm, and` being empathetic is important to building resilience. They need to understand what is happening, process it, and thoughtfully respond.

PRACTICE and rehearse scenarios

Using interactive role-playing, teach your children about resilience. Come up with some fictional situations where your children might find themselves dealing with a bully, or being harassed. Like any skill, resilience can be taught.

CHALLENGE them to do something difficult

This is a great way to teach your children how to take constructive criticism. Ask them to complete a difficult task and explain to them everything that they did right and wrong. This teaches them that life can be hard, and they aren’t always going to be good at everything right away.

Resilience Education for Bullying Prevention

Research continues to show that resilience education is a promising solution for bullying prevention. Resilience education programs lower the offense and build mental toughness in the targeted student.  Contrary to popular anti-bullying methodology, resilience education is a proven method for helping your children build inner strength and better handle difficult situations.

Through these methods, we can improve our children’s social-emotional skills which will provide them with the inner-tools they need to make the best of a difficult situation. These techniques are also the pathway to overcoming challenges like bullying and help build secure relationships. Through this, they’ll be happier and they’ll be in a better position to thrive academically.