Top 3 tips for building resilient kids that go beyond teaching them to ‘toughen up’ 

We hear a lot about resilience. It is often seen as a person’s capacity to ‘bounce back’ from adversity or adapt to challenges.  When viewed only like that, it can seem a rather fixed, individualistic concept.  

However, we aren’t born resilient and being resilient is not about ‘toughening up’. Instead, resilience is a fluctuating capacity to overcome hard times and adversity, and it’s determined by the systems and environments that surround an individual or community. 

Basically, our ability to adapt to stressful events can only become a reality when, through help-seeking behaviour, we access people and resources who can support us. 

The most important factor impacting individual and community resilience is human connectedness. That’s good news for parents and carers because it means there is lots we can do to resource our kids and help them build resilience and their capacity to manage themselves.  

It is a sad irony that the shift away from the past’s punitive methods towards more connected, responsive parenting has seen children become less resilient and capable of taking care of themselves. That is not to say we need to go back to a carrot-and-stick approach, however we need to be careful not to be overprotective, allowing children to occasionally experience failure, and emotional and physical discomfort. 

What our children need hasn’t changed at all. So, when we focus on some simple building blocks, we can strengthen their ability to meet life’s challenges and pressures with grit, confidence and perseverance. 

My top three resilience-building strategies to focus on whether your child is 2 or 12. 

1. Teach your kids about failure and disappointment

It’s natural for parents to want to protect their kids from life’s bumps and bruises. But if we cushion them too much from small failures and disappointments, they don’t learn what disappointment feels like, nor develop strategies to overcome big challenges when they come. You can teach this by modelling your own reactions to disappointment, playing real-life board and card games together to teach them to lose well. Please avoid too much online gaming where they simply ‘respawn’ when they lose.   

2. Let them do things for themselves

Life skills are more important than we realise and right from the early years we can begin to build a toolkit of life skills. As children grow, we simply put more life skills into their toolkit. The more tools, the more resilient a child will be. Whether it’s dressing themselves, making their lunch or learning to change a tyre, let them try for themselves before rushing in to do it for them. 

3. Make play a priority

Quite simply, play teaches us EVERYTHING we need to know and helps us develop every aspect of ourselves. When our children can play as much as possible with children of multiple ages and all genders, in an environment of some risk, within a scream’s distance from one safe adult, you will have a happy, healthy, resilient child. 

Finally, the foundation on which all this rests is relationships. Our kids are more resilient when they have safe systems like families, neighbourhoods, school and community groups, OSHC and clubs behind them. So, let’s foster those relationships whenever we can, because every child deserves a chance to thrive.