Ways to Increase Your Child’s Resilience
Your child’s resilience is their ability to bounce back in the face of adversity. While you may think of things like violence, bullying, sickness, and other big-life crises as adversity, the truth is that it can be much smaller than that.
Learning struggles can be an adversity. Chronic stress can be an adversity. If your child is fighting through every single school day, their brain is constantly in a state of stress, and that is getting in the way of effective learning.
While their unique situations may not change (a diagnosis is a diagnosis), as parents what you CAN do is increase their ability to bounce back and pull themselves out of this state of constant stress and overwhelm. Here are some things you can do to increase your child’s resilience.
Why does resilience matter? Check out how the brain responds to stress here >>
Sleep, Nutrition and Exercise
The foundation of brain health and full-body health rests in these 3 things. If your child isn’t sleeping well, they will be less prepared to handle the stressors of day-to-day life. If their body is constantly inflamed by diet, that inflammation also clouds thinking and judgment. Physical exercise has many well-known benefits for brain health, including supporting mood, focus, and stress management.
While these three pillars may seem daunting, taking one small step at a time to support your child in these areas will only help!
Connect Over a Joy List
This is a fun way to build your child’s resilience! Sit down with them and come up with a list of the things that bring them joy… then do them! This could be coloring, taking a walk, shopping, rock climbing, or any other hobbies or activities that fill their cup.
Expanding your child’s resilience can only happen when they feel safe and connected, and doing these joy-filled things together is a great step!
Coregulation
Even if you’re thinking “coregulation is just for babies; my child should be able to manage their outbursts,” pay attention here. Coregulation doesn’t just go away. Kids need a model of healthy ways to manage emotions and return to stability, and coregulation is an important aspect of that, no matter their age. What this looks like (whether you’re working with a toddler or a teen):
- Being a stable, calm, sensible presence
- Keeping your tone neutral and your body language welcoming
- Modeling breathwork and calming strategies that you can do together
- Resisting the urge to feed off of their emotions to escalate your own
This takes a lot of practice as parents. Nobody does this perfectly, but increasing your child’s resilience starts with this helpful stage of having your support every step of the way.
Competence
Many kids with learning struggles feel like failures day in and day out at school. It’s crucial as parents to find the things they ARE good at—and nurture those interests. Feelings of competence in one area of life can help kids feel more resilient and confident in all areas. Even if it’s not the places you envisioned your child thriving, help them find the things that do click (and that they love) and make sure you’re creating space in your life for those.
Cognitive Skills
One of the most important ways to increase your child’s resilience is by improving their brain’s capacity to take in and process the world. All input from your senses goes through a network of skills, including memory, attention, auditory and visual processing, and processing speed. If even one of these areas is weak, your child is likely to feel overburdened by ALL learning. They may also get easily overstimulated, leading to frequent outbursts (or shut-downs), depending on their personality.
Building cognitive skills can help pave the way for increased resilience by making solid neural connections for more efficient learning.When kids have the ability to effectively process new information, they are less likely to get overwhelmed or stressed by the tasks ahead of them.
There is no one cognitive skill weakness that leads to low resilience in kids. Every brain is unique, which is why an individualized and targeted approach is so important.
If your child is frequently overwhelmed by school tasks, leading to frustration, shut-downs, outbursts, or other methods of dealing with the stress, this is where you need to start!
With a cognitive skills assessment, you can get the answers about what’s going on in your child’s brain when they’re processing the world and where the potential hangups may be.
