Resilience: Ingredient List Article by Dr. Karen Reivich
Resilience is the ability to bounce back from setbacks, to learn from failure, to
be motivated by challenges and to believe in your own abilities to deal with the
stress and difficulties in life. What you might not know is that resilience can
be learned. Children can learn-from their parents, teachers, and coaches-how to
develop resilience skills.
Research has identified many important ingredients of resilience, but there are
seven that we can most easily teach our children.
- Emotion Awareness and Control: Resilient people are comfortable
with their feelings and with expressing them. In fact, resilient children experience
a broad array of emotions and feel comfortable talking about what they are feeling
with people they trust.
- Impulse Control: Resilience doesn't require that you stop having
impulses, but it does require you to stop yourself from acting on every impulse
you have.
- Realistic Optimism: Realistic optimism keeps you shooting for the
stars without losing sight of the ground below. Resilience is not served by denying
problems when they exist, but by viewing situations as optimistically as possible
within the bounds of reality.
- Flexible Thinking: Flexible thinking increases the likelihood that
you'll be able to come up with solutions to the problem you're confronting.
- Self-Efficacy: Resilient children believe that they are effective
in the world. They have learned what their strengths and weaknesses are, and they
rely on their strengths to navigate the challenges in life.
- Empathy: Empathy serves resilience by facilitating strong relationships.
Children who care about others are more likely to have strong, healthy relationships.
- Reaching Out: Children who are resilient don't see failure as something
to be avoided. Their optimism and self-efficacy give them the confidence to try,
even when that means risking failure.
No matter how resilient your child is today, you can help them to become more resilient
tomorrow. Resilience is not all or nothing—you can be a little resilient, a lot
resilient; resilient in some situations but not others. We can all become more resilient
tomorrow than we are today. In order for children to reach their fullest potential
and thrive no matter what life puts in their path, they need to know how to approach
life with resilience.