What is resilience?

Resilience is the ability to ‘bounce back’ after challenges and tough times. It’s also the ability to adapt to challenges and tough times that you can’t change and keep on thriving. In fact, when you’re resilient, you can often learn from these situations.

Children’s resilience can go up and down at different times. And children might be better at bouncing back from some challenges than others.

Children build resilience when they have:

• strong, supportive relationships with you, other family members and their community
• emotional and practical skills that help them respond well to challenges
• helpful thinking habits and attitudes.

For children, challenges and tough times include experiences like starting at a new school or kindergarten, moving house, or welcoming a sibling into the family. They can also include serious experiences like bullying, family breakdown, family illness or death.

Why is building resilience important for children?

Resilient children can recover from setbacks and get back to living their lives more quickly. When children overcome setbacks and problems, it builds their confidence and helps them feel more capable the next time a problem comes up.

And when things don’t go well and children feel anxious, sad, disappointed, afraid or frustrated, resilience helps them understand that these uncomfortable emotions usually don’t last forever. Resilient children can experience these emotions and know they’ll be OK before too long.

Resilient children are less likely to avoid problems or deal with them in unhealthy ways, like getting defensive or aggressive.

All children experience challenges but children with anxious temperaments, learning difficulties or disabilities might find certain situations particularly challenging – for example, reading aloud in class or being left with an unfamiliar carer. When children build their resilience, they’re better able to respond positively to challenges, manage their emotions and overcome setbacks.

How to build resilience: relationships for children

Relationships are the foundation of your child’s resilience.

Your child’s most important relationships are with you and their other main caregivers. Strong relationships with you and other carers help your child feel loved, safe and secure. This sense of safety and security gives your child the confidence to explore their world and to recover from any setbacks they experience.

Your child’s relationships with grandparents, aunties and uncles, early childhood educators and teachers, and friends are also important. These family and community connections give your child a sense of belonging and the feeling that they’re valued. These feelings help to build your child’s confidence and resilience.

How to build resilience: skills for children

Your child can develop emotional and practical skills that help them respond well to challenges. This lays an important foundation for resilience.

Here are skills for resilience and ways to help your child develop them.

• Understanding and managing emotions – for example, your child might be worried about a family member who’s sick. You could say, ‘I can see you’re really worried about Grandpa. It’s OK to be worried. But remember we’re doing everything we can to help him get better’.
• Being persistent – for example, encourage your child to have another go when things don’t work out the first time they try something. Praise your child for trying, no matter the result. You could say, ‘I’m proud of you for finishing the race’ or ‘Well done for giving it another go’.
• Solving problems – for example, if a child at school says or does something unkind to your child, brainstorm how your child might respond next time. Helping your child to develop problem-solving skills is better than trying to solve every minor problem for them.

Skills like managing emotions and being persistent are part of your child’s ability to self-regulate. This gives them more control over how they react to the things happening around them.

How to build resilience: helpful thinking habits and attitudes for children

Resilience is about facing challenges or disappointments, finding the positives and moving forward. There are thinking habits and attitudes that can help your child with this.

Here are ideas:

• Be a role model for resilience. When your child sees you try again, handle your emotions or think positively in difficult situations, they learn that they can do the same.
• Find positive role models for your child. These people can show your child that it’s possible to handle challenges and be OK. For example, if you and your child’s other parent have separated, it might help your child to have an older friend who shares this experience.
• Avoid predicting and preventing every problem for your child. When your child experiences small disappointments and learns to do things differently, it will help them with bigger challenges. For example, it’s OK to let your child hand in homework that you know is wrong.
• Build your child’s self-compassion. Self-compassion helps your child deal with disappointment, failures or mistakes by being kind to themselves. In turn, this helps them to move on from difficult experiences.
• Help your child recognise and acknowledge when things are going well, rather than focusing only on the difficulties. For example, you could make it a habit during family meals for everyone to share one positive thing from the day.
• Encourage your child to see themselves as resilient. You can do this by reminding them of a time they were resilient. For example, ‘I remember you were nervous about joining the team at first. And look at you now!’

Children develop resilience over time, so try to be patient and supportive while your child works out how to respond to challenges. You might want to make everything all right for your child, but sometimes your child has to go through uncomfortable feelings so they can work out things for themselves.