RESILIENCE: the capacity to recover quickly from difficulties; toughness.
You’ve no doubt heard this term resilience a lot in the media and in parent education books. Everywhere you read about parenting you hear about resilience and that your kids needs to build it up. But how do you do that? It’s not easy, but it is simple…
GIVE THEM OPPORTUNITIES TO FAIL.
You can get so busy teaching your teen how to succeed, push forward, and excel that you forget about the most important part of resilience…FAILURE.
YOU CAN’T BUILD RESILIENCE WITHOUT ADVERSITY.
Helicopter parenting has done a lot to destroy resilience. Much of helicopter parenting, or even snowplow parenting, is about removing potential obstacles from your teen’s life. But if they never encounter obstacles or resistance, how will they know they can persevere? How will they know they have what it takes to tackle those obstacles?
STEPPING OUT OF HER COMFORT ZONE BUILDS RESILIENCE.
You have to stop taking over your teen’s problems and fixing them because what that says to her is “You’re not capable of doing it on your own.” It also shields her from the discomfort of taking charge of the situation at hand. If she is missing an assignment, don’t contact her teacher for her. If she thinks her soccer coach was unfair, have her handle it. It’s these little uncomfortable moments and confrontations that show your daughter she can handle what comes her way.
FAILURE IS A STEPPING STONE TO SUCCESS.
In the moment, it sucks to watch your child fail especially if she is extremely emotional about it. You might want to jump in and try to fix her discomfort, but you don’t need to. All she needs from you is unconditional love and acceptance. And the next time she tackles that track meet or that SAT, she knows that whether she does better or worse, she’ll come through it intact.
“I have not failed 10,000 times. I’ve successfully found 10,000 ways that will not work.” -Thomas Edison
SHE’S LEARNED SHE WILL REBOUND.
Imagine if someone had stepped in and made Thomas Edison stop inventing because he was failing too much. We wouldn’t have the light bulb, the record player, or the motion picture camera. What Edison learned was that even if one invention failed, it didn’t meant that his world would come crashing to a halt. He learned lessons from each failure and moved forward. That’s what you want for your daughter. Right?
So step back and make room for failure because that’s the only way that your daughter will build true resilience and ultimately find her path to success.
With Heart,
Coach Sheri
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