The 3 Pillars of Resilience That Will Enable Your Child’s Success
All parents have at the heart of their actions a unifying goal: We want our children to have fulfilling and functional lives. protected by resilience. Why is resilience critical?
Even the most fulfilling and functional lives require resilience to withstand adversity.
Resilience, ironically, is more noticeable by its absence than its presence. A lack of resilience looks like the eighteen-year-old who gives up on getting a job after two rejections, the adult who is miserable in his position but can’t seem to find his way out, or the child who scrapes her knee while riding a bike and never tries again.
For resilient people, something happens behind the scenes of such dramatic events to keep them from being bogged down by despondency. For the non-resilient, failures define who they are and keep them from living functional and fulfilling lives.
What elements shape the elusive substance that, if properly cultivated in these people, would help them better navigate obstacles, disappointments, and frustrations?
Strength, adaptability, and recovery. Let’s look at each one in more detail.
Strength
When confronted with adversity, strength is our first line of defense.
Unforeseen circumstances will intermittently and inevitably test the factors that make our lives functional and fulfilling. These tests can be as minor as a low-grade fever or as grave as a terminal illness. In the non-resilient, they initiate an attitude of defeat.
The resilient will call upon strength to bear themselves out.
Strength can be physical, and it can be mental. It is what keeps a child running to score one more goal for the team, despite fatigue or scraped-up knees. Or it could be the force that keeps him focused on his homework despite distractions from a sibling.
A teenager displays strength when she shares her opinion about a controversial topic, stands up against peer pressure, or can steel herself against the disappointment of a breakup. It is the mental and physical resource adults draw upon to care for a parent struck by cancer or to survive their own battle with the same.
Adaptability
Now that we have extolled the value of fighting with strength for survival and success, we must caution that it is an incomplete plan of action. Times will arise when strength is not our ideal response to adversity, or when our strength is insufficient to bear us out.
In these situations, we are better served by being adaptable. Adaptability means being flexible and knowing when to change plans in order to achieve the best outcome.
Commitment has tremendous value, but only so long as that form of strength serves to support the functionality and fulfillment of our lives. When we fail to recognize the times when our established trajectory becomes dangerous, damaging, overwhelming, or otherwise deleterious, then that commitment is better defined as stubbornness.
At that moment, it is time to adapt. That said, there are also situations in which being flexible is the wrong choice. For example, we would not want to bend at the cost of our integrity. Knowing which response—strength or adaptability—is appropriate for a given circumstance is paramount. An essential component of teaching our children to be resilient is correctly modeling this discerning wisdom.
Recovery
Despite our best efforts to discern when to be strong and when to adapt, all of us experience breakdowns. There is a final, essential component of resilience that we need in order to protect the lives we build in the event of failure: recovery.
People who move forward after disaster create lives that work; those who do not continuously create lives that feel broken and tangled.
Any breakdown, no matter how trivial or how traumatic, offers us this choice
- Mire ourselves in the thick mess of it
- Trust in our ability to move forward
When we’re able to recover, there is no fear of failure. If our strength or ability to adapt fails us, we have faith in the final recourse: recover and live to create another day.