Resilience gets personal…
My best friend’s daughter killed herself last spring. Our families had grown up together. We were on vacation with her parents when it happened and got the news together. And no, we didn’t see it coming.
I know we can’t stop kids from killing themselves, but I feel compelled to try, no doubt like every other educator. And, like every other educator, I have lost kids and take it all too personally each and every time.
I lie awake thinking about it. While there are things we will, of course, work on during school hours with your kids directly, what advice could we educators presume to give to parents about building kids who can get knocked down and get back up again, more importantly over and over again?
Well, here is all I can come up with—
Don’t solve problems for your kids. Exercise restraint, and let them struggle. It will be one of the hardest things you have to have to do—watching them struggle and not helping them. And it actually is the hardest.
Likely, your parents let you struggle. It is how we figure things out. It is how we build self-efficacy, and more importantly, you will not always be there when something happens, so they need to solve problems—for themselves.
Let me be clear, I am not saying let them suffer—I am saying teach them age-appropriate problem-posing and problem-solving skills and then guide them through it—but don’t do it for them. Don’t “swoop in and solve,” which only teaches kids that they cannot figure it out themselves.
Want to know the simplest and truly elegant model for teaching problem-solving skills? Here it is in four easy steps:
- 1. Identify the problem (OK, by far the hardest step to teach children of any age).
- 2. Identify OPTIONS (this step slows or stops IMPULSE behaviors).
- 3. Evaluate options and choose one (actually, this is two steps combined, but after evaluating the upside and downside of each possible option, pick one).
- 4. Evaluate the outcome (don’t leave this step out—how did it go? For future reference, would you make a different choice next time or was it the right decision?)
The key is YOU are not jumping in and just figuring the problem out and immediately jumping to step 3 for them. If you do, they never learn to clarify the problem for themselves, never learn that there are possible options to solve it other than their parents coming to the rescue, and never see other possible outcomes—so one day when they run into a problem on their own and you are not there, then what?
Will this strategy build resilience? I don’t know. Will it help solve this problem? I don’t know that either. Did my best friend’s daughter have these problem-solving skills? Yes, I thought so. I still lie awake at night trying to figure out what else we could have done. And the truth is, even with these skills, sometimes, it’s not enough.
But let’s give them every skill we can. It’s OK to get knocked down. It’s not OK not to get back up.
Marja Brandon is head of Woodland School in Portola Valley, CA. This article was published on her blog and is posted here with permission from Marja Brandon.
Like most of the pictures on ParentsAssociation.com, the picture posted with this article is courtesy of a free download from Pixabay.com.
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