5 Ways to Teach Your Child Emotional Resiliency

Morning snuggles with my children are such a treat. I adore getting to spend a few minutes simply being still with the kids before the rush of the day begins.

On this particular morning, it was just Averie and I. After the morning haziness passed, Averie started planning her birthday party. The party she has been planning since the moment she left her last party.

She was going over the guest list when suddenly, she burst into tears. Through the sobs, she told me she felt rejected by a friend. Averie had felt ignored during their last playdate, and now she believed they were no longer friends.

The emotions our children experience aren’t always based in reality, but they certainly feel real. It would have been easy for me to dismiss and minimize Averie’s emotional pains. From an adult perspective, we can see how trivial their circumstances can be. But to a child, the emotions are valid and real. And depending on your child’s temperament, those emotions can be expressed in very different ways.

Combining my role as mom and my skills as a therapist, I embarked on a lesson of emotional resiliency with my precious daughter:

Validate their experience. It’s natural for parents to want to shield their children from negative emotions. Whether you acknowledge your child’s emotions or not, they still feel them. As a parent, take the opportunity to validate their experience. I did this by taking the time to tell Averie, “I know you are sad right now and your heart is hurting.” This acknowledged her experience and helped her to begin to have the language to use to communicate her feelings as she encounters other emotional hurdles.

Reaffirm your child’s identity. “At the heart of resilience is a belief in oneself— yet also a belief in something larger than oneself,” Hara Estroff Marano writes in “The Art of Resilience.” In the face of rejection or other painful emotions, speak truth about your child’s identity. I told Averie who she is: a smart, kind, and funny person. My hope is that she will model this in the face of future adversity. Circumstances and challenges are sure to come, but my prayer is that she will have a firm foundation, secure in her identity and self-worth.

Broaden the horizon. Grown-ups and children alike lack perspective from time to time. Help your child see the bigger picture. In this instance, Averie only focused on this one friend. She’s an important friend, but only one of many friendships in her life. Discussing these other friendships transformed her tears into smiles.

Foster problem-solving skills. A part of me wanted to give Averie a list of things she could do differently in the future, but this would have been the wrong approach. Regardless of age, begin teaching your child how to solve problems for themselves. Provide opportunities to cultivate problem-solving skills. The result is empowerment and healthy self-esteem.

Give them lots of love. When kids know they are unconditionally loved, they enter the world with greater resolve and confidence.

Being a parent is a hair-raising, gut-wrenching thrill ride of an experience. Just like Forrest Gump, you never know what you are going to get. That day a sweet snuggle moment transformed into an emotional crisis. I’m reminded of Proverbs 22:6: “Train up a child in the way they should go, and even when they are old they will not turn from it.”

Invest in your child’s emotional well-being. This investment yields great dividends both now and in the future.