Flexing Your Resilience Muscle – Even When It Hurts
Resilience is like a muscle. Develop it, and it will serve you when you need it most. Ignore it, and it will atrophy.
We talk a lot about teaching children to be strong, adaptable, and able to recover. But what about maintaining our resilience as parents?
I started training to be a parent with a book about teaching my infant to sleep at night. Everything I had tried was failing miserably. My baby cried all the time, and I was desperate to ease his suffering (and mine). The book suggested that giving a baby what he wants all the time is not wise and prescribed a routine of sleep, eat, play, then sleep again (rather than sleep and eat whenever the baby demands). The suggestion worked! More importantly, though, it gave me the confidence to let my child be acutely uncomfortable for the sake of long-term development.
The parenting training has continued, of course. Funny, it still revolves largely around the themes of eating, play, and sleep. Now I’m asking how to maintain a healthy diet when the kids want sweets. How to encourage them to sleep at a reasonable hour even when they’d prefer to stay up? How can I keep them reading stimulating books when they like bubblegum books best and limit screen time even though they’d love to be playing the videogames they hear everybody talking about.
Here’s a general lesson that applies to all parenting practices: getting everything we want all the time is bad for our mental health. It makes us entitled, spoiled, squishy. And then, when we encounter a situation where we can’t get what we want, we don’t know how to respond. We get squished.
Yet, I still never relish telling a child “no.”
Ach! Just the sound of that word! It’s like a brick wall. I look for any and all opportunities to say “yes” to their requests so that the family wheels keep turning smoothly. Of course, I can’t agree all the time. “No” is often the right answer to keep those family wheels on track. We, parents have to be strong enough to stick to our plan. (You do have a parenting plan? If not, read the chapter on ‘Parenting with Intention’, it will revolutionize your experience). It means accepting your child’s discomfort sometimes and not letting them have everything they want on a whim. When would adult life ever offer that?
You are practicing resilience as a parent so that your kids can be resilient too.
Practice discomfort. Practice failure. Well… the rebounding bit.
Somewhere along the way, our family started hiking. Physical challenges with predetermined goals are a great way to practice resilience parenting. I think our first hike was a mile to the ice cream shop. Yes, we gave in to the temptation to bribe with sugar! Before long, though, the walks themselves became their own sweet reward. Time to think, talk about our thoughts, invent stories and weird word games, time in silence, time in nature. We have come to love these simple joys.
The walks are not always joyful. Sometimes, they are painful. We have both succeeded brilliantly and failed miserably.
What does failure look like? A child frozen, wet, covered in sheep mess, and sobbing while darkness sets in over the miles of hill yet to be trod. That was in Ireland four years ago. A child vomiting and white-lipped from altitude sickness. That was just this year on Volcano Chimborazo in Ecuador. Failure is always an option, and you can never be sure when it’s going to happen. For that reason, rebounding from failure is something we need to practice too.
Failures can be minuscule or mountainous.
The odds weren’t good when beginning our most challenging slope yet, Volcano Tungurahua in the Ecuadorian Andes. The weather was wet and visibility was nil. Two groups of young adults had just tried to summit to 16,500 feet and failed from the wind and the cold. Our guide had never taken such young kids before. We’d never been so high without becoming physically ill.
Having seen the detrimental effects of high altitude on Chimborazo, we approached Tungurahua with better preparedness. We slept as high as we could, took ever-higher practice hikes on the preceding days, and gave ourselves a full day of rest before our summit attempt. We taught our kids that our failure a month before was a positive experience if we used it as motivation to learn how to approach climbing smarter.
Not long after beginning early in the morning, we realized that our guide was not exaggerating when he called the climb slippery. Every step was perilous! The younger two boys spent as much time on their faces as their feet. The only way to stay standing was to brace ourselves with poles on the downward slope to keep traction.
Frustrated with the plodding progress, one of my boys asked if we could turn back. I mustered all the parenting muscles I’ve been developing these past twelve years and told him “no.”
Uncomfortable, but not unsafe.
There was little danger but lots of discomfort. The hike was grueling, yes (and would continue to become increasingly so). We were having to learn new skills to take each step. There were no views because the cloud cover was thick. No leisurely time to wander in our imaginations while we wandered with our feet. This was work!
After surmising that we were not at risk of significant injury or illness, I got down to eye level with my son and said, “Remember, we chose this challenge. We made this plan because we believed we could do it. And we practice challenges like these so that when the next challenge shows up uninvited, we are ready.” Besides, who said we couldn’t enjoy work?
We practice confronting challenges so that we are prepared for life.
Resilience is a muscle.
Many aspects of the two days we spent reaching the crater of that volcano were miserable. But the joy we had on our descent! (Once we got past the freezing rain bit.) The feeling of togetherness! (And that’s not just because we were tied together with rope and harnesses). The fulfillment of accomplishment, gratitude, and unforgettable experience!
Not all challenges are physical. Often, though, the physical challenges are the simplest to understand. They teach us about how we confront difficulty. They teach us how to work through discomfort. They teach us how to stay strong long past when we thought it possible. Then we can apply the feelings of perseverance to other life situations like keeping a job, building relationships, or learning a new skill. We practice resilience by being challenged in an environment where we are uncomfortable but safe.
Remember that as you are teaching your children to flex their resilience muscles, you should be doing the same. Be willing to say ‘no’ when necessary to keep your family intentions with integrity; you may just find that the resistance is exactly the weight you need to stay strong together. And if life is not already providing them, seek out uncomfortable (but safe) challenges so that you are staying mentally fit for all of life’s challenges.
