Chris Mance II - Mental Skills Coach

Resilience is one of those behaviors that can make or break a child as they transition into adulthood. Resilience is a learned behavior that provides the ability to overcome and persevere through obstacles, adversity, misfortune, and unwanted change.

Children are not born resilient, it’s something that they must learn and develop over time. As a result, it’s a parents responsibility to develop resiliency in their children. But what should a parent focus on to help a child exhibit resilient behavior?

Fortunately, this question is not a mystery. Psychologist have been researching this question for over 30 years. What’s more, psychologist Bonnie Benard provides parents with four overarching characteristics to focus on for raising resilient children. In her seminal research on the topic Fostering Resiliency in Kids: Protective Factors in the Family, School, and Community, Bernard describes these four characteristics:

1. Social Competence: Includes the qualities of responsiveness, flexibility, empathy and caring, communication skills, a sense of humor, and any other prosocial behavior.
2. Problem Solving Skills: These skills include the ability to think abstractly, reflectively, and flexibly and to be able to attempt alternate solutions for both cognitive and social problems.
3. Autonomy: A sense of one’s own identity and an ability to act independently and exert some control over one’s environment.
4. Sense of Purpose and Future: This includes several related attributes: healthy expectancies, goal-directedness, success orientation, achievement motivation, educational aspirations, persistence, hopefulness, hardiness, belief in a bright future, a sense of anticipation, a sense of a compelling future, and a sense of coherence.

In conclusion, in order to raise resilient children you must treat resilience like a muscle. Just like a physical muscle, the lack of training will leave this resilience muscle weak. My recommendation is to use Bonnie Benard’s four character traits as a template to develop your resilience training program.