Your child will likely go through hard times in their life, and they will need to get back up. This is known as resilience and is an incredibly valuable skill as it teaches children to face up to their problems and deal with difficult situations independently. It’s a tricky thing to master however as of course it involves facing up to your fears. With encouragement and the tips below from a private school in West London, it’s something that you can help your child to build.
Help Your Child
Solutions aren’t always apparent, so your child may need help to navigate the problems they’re faced with. Be there for them and to lend a helping hand should they need it.
Provide Emotional Support
Setbacks can be scary and have a huge effect on a child’s confidence. To help them get back on their feet it’s important that you provide encouragement and emotional support. Talking to your child will help you to understand what’s holding them back and tackle their fears together.
Don’t Create False Hope
Having said that, you should try and avoid giving your child false hope as if they don’t do as well as expected, they will only be more disappointed. Be honest with your child and realistic as this is what will really help them get through their difficulties.
Coping Strategies
When things don’t go as planned, we can become anxious which can trigger a fight or flight response. This can lead to badly dealt problems or giving up completely. Coping strategies can help children to handle stressful situations and there are various ways that you can help your child to manage their stress, increasing resilience. You can talk to them as recommended above, introduce meditation, breathing exercises, go for a walk and experiment with stress balls and similar toys that help children to destress. While we have some excellent strategies here, it’s worth mentioning that they may not work for your child straight away. They will need to practise them regularly and if there’s no improvement, it may be worth speaking to a GP or a professional for support with their anxiety.
Exposure to Difficult Situations
The key to being resilient is self-belief. With the more setbacks children encounter and overcome, it grows which gives them the ability to tackle problems in the future. While it may be difficult, you must allow your child the opportunity to experience some of these difficult situations and handle them by themselves. By all means you should help where possible, but allow your child the chance to be in the driver’s seat and learn how to deal with them.
Set Goals
While left to the end of this post, goal setting is one of the first things that you should do with your child. Establishing clear outcomes and an idea of what they want to achieve will give your child something to look forward to and remind them of why they’re doing what they are when things get hard. When putting them together, try and create “checkpoints” where they are able to see the progress they have made and how far they have left to go.
The bottom line
While this post aims to offer parents advice on helping children develop resilience, it’s also equally important that they aren’t afraid to ask for help when they need it. It’s not the same as giving up and should not be seen in the same way as we all have our own skills and things that we’re not so good at. Leaning on others can actually help them to learn new ways of doing things and help them within their own growth.
