How To Raise A Resilient Child

The best gift you can give your child is emotional strength.

“Persistence and resilience only come from having been given the chance to work though difficult problems.” Gever Tulley

When my daughter was three, an unfortunate episode became a lesson on resilience.

I used to take her to programs at the YMCA. I’d drop her off and watch her run to meet her friends. I’d stay and watch for a few minutes and then be on my way, knowing she was safe and having fun.

There was one a little blonde-haired girl that had become her “best friend,” and they’d play together every day.

One day when I picked my daughter up, she told me her friend said she didn’t like her anymore.

She said she didn’t want to be friends.

At that moment, I had a choice to make. I could project my own childhood feelings of rejection and sadness onto her. Or I could make it a teachable moment.

I decided to do the latter.

I chose not to parent from my own rejection story.

When I was very young, my best friend called and told me the meeting of our club was canceled.

Since the meeting was canceled, I decided to go to the park by myself.

When I got to the park, everybody in the club was there.

Everybody but me.

I hid in the ditch, ashamed. Terrified of being found out. I sat and cried and watched everyone laughing and playing. Since I did not have a happy home life, there was nobody I could go to for comfort. Nobody to make it okay.

There was just me, rejected, loser, alone and them, everybody else, the club, playing and having fun.

If my sister had found out, she would have rubbed it in and made it worse. She lived to humiliate me.

That was a terrible, traumatic moment.

It was something that remained with me for years. I cried about it in therapy many times.

The trauma of seeing all of my friends there and the realization that my best friend, the girl I played with every day, could be so cruel, bore a deep hole in my soul.

I want it to say its fully healed, but in truth, it never has.

So I vowed to take painful lessons and make them into teachable opportunities for my daughter.

I never want anyone to have the kind of power over her that that girl had over me.

That day, I gave her a dose of emotional reinforcement.

“Resilience isn’t a single skill. It’s a variety of skills and coping mechanisms. To bounce back from bumps in the road as well as failures, you should focus on emphasizing the positive.” Jean Chatzky

I taught her a lesson about people. One that is as timely today in her teens as it was when she was three, as it will be in her 20’s, 30’s and beyond.

I taught her that some people are jerks, and it’s not her problem.

I sat her down, and as we ate our lunch, we had a chat. I didn’t ask her how it made her feel or if she was sad. We just discussed what had happened, calmly and casually.

Children this young have no frame of reference.

If they’re going to learn to associate a feeling of not being enough or rejection with someone not liking them, chances are you’re the one who’ll put it there.

It is both tricky and critical for parents to make sure we don’t project our emotional baggage onto our kids.

I told her it was okay for this girl not to like her, that she isn’t going to like everyone she meets, and that’s also okay.

I told her she doesn’t have to like everyone, but she has to treat everyone the same, even the people she doesn’t like. She needs to respect and be kind to everyone, but that’s as far as it goes.

I told her I was glad the girl was mean to her because it showed her who she really is.

I told her that she doesn’t need mean friends, and if someone is mean, they are doing you a favor. By showing you how mean they are, you can choose not to waste any more time on them.

I told her there were so many other kids in the program that it should be super easy for her to find a whole new bunch of nice friends to play with. That even if that little girl wants to be friends again, it’s probably a good idea not to go back to playing with her.

I told her that if that girl was mean to her once, she is probably just a mean person.

I spent the next few weeks discussing these points every time I dropped her off.

In the end, because I didn’t make a big deal of it, it didn’t really matter. She made other friends, and she stopped playing with that girl. It was no big deal.

The truth is that some people are mean. Whether they’re 3-year-old toddlers or 30-year-old bankers, mean people are mean people and nice people are well-advised to steer clear.

Children can learn empowering lessons if we can find it in ourselves to teach them.

The lesson I taught my daughter from that incident has served her well. She bounces back from rejection and doesn’t get caught up in other people’s drama.

She is a grounded 13-year-old. She chooses nice friends. I’m hoping the internalized lesson of that day helps her through the dilemmas of high school and the rollercoaster ride of young love and dating.

Ultimately, the best gift we can give our children is emotional strength to carry them through life.

Eventually, they’ll have to go it alone and inner strength will be their best resource.

“Resilience is knowing that you are the only one that has the power and the responsibility to pick yourself up.” Mary Holloway

Being aware of the triggering that can happen when your child’s feelings get hurt can go a long way to helping you help them become resilient.

When you find the positive lessons in adverse situations, you give them the tools they need to navigate life.

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