- 28 Oct, 2023
- 0 Comments
- 3 Mins Read
Top tips for building resilient children.
A quick summary; a resilient child is more likely to be less anxious. A child becomes resilient by meeting ‘healthy’ challenges and succeeds. They need to be allowed time to celebrate that success so their brain knows what it feels like and they don’t just jump from one challenge to another. This can ultimately lead to an unhappy burn-out situation, sometimes in their teens, sometimes later in life, sometimes still in childhood. The more success a child meets the more their levels of anxiety and nerves diminish, they know by drawing upon their character strengths, they can achieve. They also need to learn that sometimes they won’t succeed and, again, they need to draw upon the strengths within them, like bravery, to pick themselves up and have another go.
Top tip #1 – Teach your child how to breathe from their diaphragm. This is deep breathing and it not only builds up their lungs so they can speak with confidence and clarity, but also the same method of breathing is used to reduce stress. See my free breathing exercises at www.sayitclearly.nz
#2 – Talk to your child. With tech down or off. Look them in their eyes as you speak and try really really hard to leave the criticism at bay and just listen to what they are telling you. When children and teens are facing challenges being judged, criticised and compared to others are the worst things you can do to build their resilience. Encourage them to recognise their strengths and work to those. They may have to dig deep to find those strengths. Use Google Images to find the 7 character strengths so you can develop the vocab to help them out. If you like a read try “The Strengths Switch” by Lea Waters, it’s easy to read and very actionable.
#3 – Discover what a healthy challenge is. I have a short video on YouTube showing you what it looks like. Putting them into a situation where they can achieve, if they are feeling nervous or anxious and then celebrating that success before moving onto the next challenge or goal. Here’s the link – While you are there, have a look at the other video about comfort zones and how to step out of yours to meet new challenges that you’re not going to die from. Oh, and if you do have a look please subscribe to my channel 🙂
#4 – Emotional Intelligence. Isn’t it our aim to build emotionally intelligent adults who contribute to the best of their ability in our communities? The four domains of Emotional Intelligence — self awareness, self management, social awareness, and relationship management — each can help anyone face any crisis with lower levels of stress, less emotional reactivity and fewer unintended consequences. There are a number of books out there on this but Daniel Goleman or Brene Brown would be at the top of the list of reads.
#5 – How this fits in with speech. Well. The better anyone can articulate their thoughts and feelings with confidence and clarity is a win for everyone. I truly don’t think oral literacy is placed high enough in our education system and for the most part I feel like the only one standing on my soap box saying come on, grown ups, we need to do better. Children lead by our example and when they hear ‘youse/yiz’ or read wanna, gunna, kinda throughout social media, how can we expect the tamariki to do better? Our literacy levels on the world stage are sinking but we aren’t looking at the right place to start fixing the issue.
“Oral language underpins all learning and all social interaction.”
– Page 7, ‘Learning Through Talk’ Ministry of Education, Learning Media, Wellington, New Zealand, 2009.
Could you stand by this then please Ministry of Education?