3 steps to more resilient kids!

How would you define resilience?

The dictionary tells us that it’s the ability to recover quickly from difficulty.

From our work with kids, we like to think that its more nuanced than that.

Resilience strikes us as the ability to tolerate difficult feelings. It might be that hard things are happening outside of us,  but resilience is the ability to tolerate the feelings that the event brings up inside of us. Like a tree in stormy weather,  we might bend and sway with the feelings but they don’t bring us and others to our knees.

Without resilience we might see a very reactive child or adult. For example, if I can’t tolerate the feeling of anger in my body I might start shouting. I might start hitting or I might run away. If I can’t tolerate the feeling of boredom whilst waiting my turn I might look ‘spoilt’ or become agitated or ruin the game.

 Kids don’t come into the world with emotional regulation skills so helping them to tolerate their big feelings is important. Even more so if you have a neurodiverse child who may feel their feelings more.

Here are 3 quick ways to help children with this either in school or at home:

1) Identify feelings – when a child is very young you might suggest the feeling to them to increase their emotional vocabulary. ‘ That sounds lonely.’ With older children they might resist us identifying feelings for them so we usually suggest saying things like, ‘ I sometimes feel lonely when that happens to me.’ Identifying feelings is important so that we realise we have feelings

 2) Find the feeling in your body- this might be news to some, but feelings exist physically in our bodies. If this is new to you think about hunger- that’s a physical feeling in our bodies. We are trying to become aware of how we feel in our bodies and turn inward towards the feeling rather than trying to get rid of it by focusing outward.

3) Remember feelings only last 90 seconds biologically and you can find an effective way of processing them. This is where our tools like Flex-it! come in…