(Collaborative post) They say children are resilient but what do they mean by this? Resilience is the ability to bounce back from a difficult situation and is a behaviour that’s learned over time. No matter how much we prepare our children to face life’s challenges, it’s inevitable that they will face some form of adversity. I’ve collaborated with a senior school in Hertfordshire to share advice on how to raise a resilient child. The suggestions are ones we can all look to do easily.
How to Raise a Resilient Child
Encourage Your Child to Be Brave
Our children learn by taking risks. By taking risks and experiencing a failure they can develop resilience. By encouraging our children to make brave choices, we boost their self-confidence and allow them to achieve more giving them the willpower to push through after a knockback. Risks could include taking part in a sports competition in a specific sport they enjoy and take part in regularly or a writing contest. It could be even something like learning to ride a bike or to roller skate. Make sure of course this is something that they should be able to do at their age.
Plenty of Praise
To try again after failing to succeed requires a lot of self-belief. By praising your child and reminding them of their strength, you can give your child the confidence they need. While this is important, it’s vital to always remain honest. Giving your child false hope can set them up for failure and ultimately break their trust.
Make Space for Mistakes
Having a supportive relationship with your child where they can make mistakes is the key here. By being a parent that’s nurturing and reassuring of their child’s mistakes, you raise a child that’s not afraid of failure. This can help them to ‘get back up’ after a difficult experience and try again.
Research shows that while fear can motivate us in the short term, it can have detrimental consequences to a person’s mental health in the long term. Ultimately, this can result in complete mental retreat and make it difficult to even attempt even simple tasks.
Pin It!
Remind Your Child of The Positives of Completing a Challenge
Reminding your child of the reasons why they wanted to take on a challenge in the first place can give them the motivation needed to persevere through. As an activity to do together, you could help your child to create a mood board with images associated with their goal.
Teach Your Child Self-Care
We talk about self-care often but it’s normally targeted towards adults. Children should also be taught about self-care and how it can impact them. My girls and son all enjoy having a pamper ever once in a while. Out come the bath bombs, sheet masks etc. They also enjoy scooting and riding their bikes, combining exercise with something they enjoy and guarantees fun. It’s important to teach them ways to relax from early on so they can handle the stresses life throws at them.
Now you have read my post; How to Raise a Resilient Child, which tips did you like most? Did you have any other tips to add that would be helpful?
Enjoyed this Post?
Subscribe to Melanie’s Fab Finds RSS feed to see my latest posts. Posts will include recipes, reviews etc. and as a result, you will hear about my new posts and competitions first!
Watch our fab product reviews on YouTube x
Discover more from Melanie's Fab Finds
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Some really handy tips! Certainly lots of encouragement and talk of positive outcomes helps. Self care is a must too and there are so many fabulous pamper products for children to use these days – bath bombs are a great idea! Sim x
Self care is often overlooked when it comes to children. It’s just as important for them.
Some fantastic tips on raising a resilient child here! Nice to see you collaborating with Berkhamsted – it’s a great school and I know some students who are very happy there.
Thanks Rebecca. There are some great schools about.
I try to raise my children to be resilient but it is very hard as school is not always a positive place for them.
I know what you mean. They can be affected greatly by the other students at school.
Really great advice, people should encourage to keep trying even if it looks hard to begin with
That’s very true. It is a great way to learn to tackle things we find difficult.
Making space for mistakes is so important. I would almost say encouraging mistakes is also important!
We do learn from our mistakes so need to make some too.
I love the idea of self-care for the children, my daughter loves a pamper evening. Great ideas and tips.
Kids do really love them no matter whether they are girls or boys. All mine do. You should join in the fun x
Such great tips and so easy to do as well, they do learn a lot from us as parents and giving them the right start where they learn from us really does help them grow
It does help that these are easy. Always good to know for those starting out first time around.
However, learning resilience to a child must also be something that does not kill the illusion and the dream. They need it.
Yes, that’s very true. They need to be nurtured as they develop.
Some great tips here for parents wanting their child to be more resilient. Thanks for these tips
Thanks Ash. I’m glad you liked the post.
Space for mistakes is so important as everyone makes mistakes and it’s so important to know how to deal with them x
It is important and we learn each time we make them.
Great tips! I remember my mom would always leave little notes in my lunch box and it really helped me get through the day. I was a really anxious kid and those words of encouragement has a huge impact on me.
That’s so lovely. It can help boost a child knowing someone has their back and cares.
This is so useful for parents. Learning to be resilient is a powerful skill for children, a really insightful read.
It is important for this day and age.
It is important to be resilient, it is something I am learning late in life! Love this, thanks for sharing.
It is important to learn as early as possible as it makes a big difference to our lives.
So important to raise a resilient child and these are great tips for parents so they know and are guided how to. Thank you for this.
Having three children myself it helps to share information with other parents.
This is so crucial when it comes to raising a resilient child. You want what’s best for your kid and you want them to become the best version of themselves so these tips are super helpful for that.
Thanks Jasmine. That’s the aim although it takes time and effort.
I like make space for mistakes as we all make them. Reminding them about the positives in a challenge is a great tip too!
Making mistakes is a good way to learn. We learn so much form our own experiences.
Teaching your child self care is so important. This year has been hard on mental health and self care is key to trying to stay positive.
It certainly is. We do need to stay positive and by practicing self care we can help ourselves cope better with challenges.
Resiliency is so very important. After all, look at the year we have all been through and are still going through. Resilience is essential!
It really can help us cope better.
It is very good to teach a child resilience – these tips are so helpful. Being a good role model and showing that you are resilient is also helpful.
A parent needs to practice what they preach. Children are always watching!!
Very informative post, I will keep this in mind. Thanks for sharing.
Thanks Risa. I’m glad you liked the post.
You give good and insightful advice on topics it’s never easy to talk about. I am not a parent yet but I find a lot more confidence when I think about my future parenting when I read your blog
I am sure you’ll do a great job Lyosha.
Resiliency is a good thing to focus on. As a teacher I see so many kids getting destroyed by even little things. They just hold on to them.
It is awful but then it depends on what they have been taught and seen to learn from.
These are some great points, I think we all want to make sure our children are resilient, doing a challenge is a really good idea
It can really help them grow.
I like the idea of making space for mistakes. Giving ourselves grace! It should start from young. 🙂
I agree, many of us are too hard on ourselves.
I agree with all of these especially making space for mistakes as it allows children to move to a deeper level of understanding.
It sure does. That’s one way to learn, through our mistakes.
I definitely think encouraging them to be brave and sometimes doing things they don’t want to do does build their self confidence.
It certainly does allowing them the confidence to try more things.
What great advice! Definitely going to apply some of these points to my parenting.
That’s great to hear Ashten. Parenting can be very rewarding.
Children are often more like their parents than we like to admit. Maybe resilient children come from resilient parents? When growing up our children seemed to reflect all my worst character flaws but now the youngest is changing from a teenager back into a human being they seem to have turned out OK. Caterpillars become butterflies and teenagers turn into human beings. Isn’t nature wonderful.
It certainly is. It is important to remember we do influence them strongly and they are always observing how we act with others as well as how we treat them.
Fabulous advice. I’ll let Anna know she has just become a new mum. This would be a great help
Thanks for sharing my post Sharon x