The power of ‘bouncing with’ adversity

It’s fair to say our kids have faced a lot of adversity in the past few years. We like to think kids are inherently resilient, but are there ways we can help them through not just daily stressors, but also the bigger challenges in life?

Absolutely, said Dr. Stella Dentakos, a clinical and health psychologist with the Hospital for Sick Children. She’s outlined some simple strategies parents and caregivers can use to support resiliency in their kids.

What do we mean when we talk about resiliency in kids?

Resilience is often described as an individual’s ability to recover from challenges. If you Google it, you’ll probably land on a definition describing resilience as the capacity to “bounce back.” This isn’t wrong, but what I don’t love about that definition is the idea of bouncing back.

Within that definition is an expectation that when we face a hard time, somehow we’ll be able to return unchanged to the way things were before that hard time. Frankly, it’s not realistic to remain unaffected by adversity.

OK, so how do you define resilience?

At the very core of resiliency is the ability to learn from difficult experiences, and then be able to use that learning the next time you face adversity.

One of the ways that kids actually build resilience is by facing adversity, being able to tolerate and manage it, and bouncing with that hardship.

So, instead of encouraging kids to bounce back from adversity, we encourage them to bounce with it.

What does that look like?

It’s labelling and validating what kids are feeling, helping to balance what’s uncertain with what’s certain, and encouraging them to ask for help when they’re overwhelmed.

■ Labelling and validating feelings

When our kids come to us because they’re hurting or upset, it’s natural for us to want to fix the problem. We want to make the hurt go away. And sometimes that’s the right thing to do — but not always.

Kids need to learn that all emotions are safe — even the hard ones. They need to know it’s OK to feel them, and that all feelings pass. Emotions can be uncomfortable. So, building a tolerance to sit with feeling sad or angry, notice that it passes and move forward, is a key skill.

Parents can help kids do this by labelling and validating their feelings. This can be as simple as replacing the word “but” with “because.”

Let’s say your child tells you they’re feeling upset. Instinctively, you might say, “I know you’re feeling sad but it’s going to pass.” Or, “I know you’re angry but you’re going to be fine.”

Think about shifting your response to: “I know you’re feeling sad because that comment hurt your feelings.” Or, “I know you’re angry because you were looking forward to this.” This way, you’re labelling what they’re feeling and validating their emotion.

With younger kids, you might need to label the emotion for them. You might say, “You’re upset because you really wanted that toy.” This helps them make the connection to how they feel, plus it helps them identify what has caused those feelings. As they get older, typically they can label their feelings, and we do more of the validating.

■ Balancing uncertainty with certainty If the pandemic has taught us anything, it’s that daily life can be unpredictable and uncertain. When best-laid plans can go awry, kids have questions.

And sometimes the answers are not so great, and parents can be reluctant to burden their kids with difficult information.

One solution is to try and balance uncertainty with something that’s certain. For example, if your family is going through a difficult time, your child might ask, “When is this going to end?” Or, “Is it going to be like this forever?”

You might genuinely not know when that stress is going to be over. So, you might say, “I don’t know when it will end. What I do know is we’re going to get through this together as a family.”

This way, you’re staying open and honest, yet balancing that uncertain response with something that is certain and tangible.

And that tends to land very well with kids.

■ Empowering kids to ask for help We have this concept of a resilient person being someone who can handle everything on their own. I’d like to debunk that because being resilient doesn’t mean you have to face things alone. I don’t think we want to teach our kids that they must always handle hard things by themselves.

When kids are having trouble coping, when emotions are getting in the way of them engaging with friends or going to school, we want them to feel they can reach out and tell someone.

I’d love it if more kids understood that seeking support is resiliency in action.

We want our kids to know that talking to a parent, telling a teacher or speaking with a mental-health professional is being resilient. I want to normalize that care-seeking behaviour because a lot of kids and teens I work with tell me, “I couldn’t do it on my own. I failed, so here I am.”

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We want our kids to know that talking to a parent, telling a teacher or speaking with a mental-health professional is being resilient

HELPFUL RESOURCES

■ KIDSHELPPHONE.CA

■ ABOUTKIDSHEALTH.CA

■ ANXIETYCANADA.COM