Resilience: A Muscle Parents Must Help Children Strengthen Not Exercise
No child is naturally resilient. In addition, just because a child is born in a situation that requires facing many difficult challenges doesn’t mean they will naturally become resilient either.
Resilience is a mental muscle. Therefore, just like a physical muscle, the lack of deliberate strength training will leave that muscle underdeveloped. In addition, exercising a muscle doesn’t necessarily make it stronger. Exercise may keep the muscle from getting weaker, but exercise is different than strength training.
Strength training, whether it’s physical or mental requires one’s intentions and attention to be in harmony to train specific muscles. To put it another way, you can’t build mental or physical strength by accident. You must follow a process specifically designed for building strength.
Circling back to the ideal of building the resilience muscle in children. There are three rules of thumb to keep in mind.
- Do not bubble wrap your kids.
- Deliberately put your children in situations that require them to fail, fail, and fail again before they can succeed.
- Repeatedly talk to them about what resilience is, talk to them about examples from your life, history and in the current news, as well as explain to them the importance of having this characteristic.
Exercising the resilience muscle would be doing just 1 of these 3 things. Strength training the resilience muscle is doing all three.