The Art of Building Resilience
By Melody Guyton Butts, Associate Director of Marketing & Communications
Psychologist Dr. Becky Kennedy is a popular source of parenting advice on social media and author of “Good Inside: A Guide to Becoming the Parent You Want to Be.”
If rooms could personify the people who occupy them, Horton Hall let out a breezy exhale and dropped its shoulders as parenting expert Dr. Becky Kennedy prefaced her late February talk at Durham Academy Middle School with a reassuring admission.
“Being open to learning about parenting is seriously one of the bravest things we can do,” she said. “You love the heck out of your kids, and hearing a new idea makes us think, Oh, I messed that up. I just want you to know that everything we talk about, I do 50, 20, 80% of the time myself at best. That’s the best it gets: taking an idea, trying to do it some of the time, repairing when we don’t and then moving on to the next day.”
Developmental psychologist and professor Dr. Tovah Klein is author of “Raising Resilience: How to Help Our Children Thrive in Times of Uncertainty.
That behavior — parents trying their best, and even when they might come up short, trying yet again — is exactly the sort of resilience that Kennedy and fellow psychologist Dr. Tovah Klein spoke about during their visits to DA this year. At the heart of both talks was a focus on raising adaptable, independent children who are deeply secure in the knowledge that they are loved.
In introducing Klein at her presentation to parents in January, DA Director of Strategic Initiatives Victoria Muradi explained that this year’s parent education focus on resilience is aligned with the school’s mission to prepare students to live moral, happy and productive lives. “Those qualities don’t come from avoiding setbacks,” Muradi explained. “They come from learning how to respond to them over and over again. … When our children learn to persist, they are believing in their own capacity, and they’re building these skills that will help them throughout their lives.”
So — served up with the reassurance that even the most influential parenting experts of our time don’t follow their own advice 100% of the time — here are five takeaways from Kennedy’s and Klein’s visits to DA.
The following excerpts from Kennedy’s and Klein’s remarks have been lightly edited for clarity and brevity.
1. Resilience is a learned skill.
Resilience isn’t about powering through or being tough; rather, it’s the skill of being able to face uncertainty, adapt under pressure and refuel after setbacks. Klein and Kennedy say all children are capable of developing resilience through exposure to challenges — so long as they are supported by adults who help them feel safe in struggling, failing and trying again.
“It’s not about tough love on the parents’ part. It’s not about armor. It’s not a trait. It’s not inborn, like you’re born resilient or you’re not. The good news is, everybody’s born with the capacity for it, and it’s not static. It’s going to develop through their relationship with their primary caregivers.”
Dr. Tovah Klein
“Building resilience feels anything except for resilient. It is ugly, it is messy, it is whining, it is protest. … Resilience isn’t limiting the range of feelings we can have. Resilience is actually defined by our ability to tolerate the widest range of feelings and still feel capable as a person.”
Dr. Becky Kennedy
2. Feelings are real and valid. But they don’t run the show.
Both Kennedy and Klein stress that parents can validate kids’ feelings and hold the line simultaneously. And learning to regulate emotions when things don’t go your way is key to developing resilience. When kids feel seen and understood, Klein says, they’re more willing to take on hard things.
“A precondition for having a skill to manage a feeling is giving yourself permission to have the feeling. You can’t develop skills for feelings you believe you’re not supposed to have. … But feelings being real doesn’t mean that feelings should change an entire family system. You are the authority. Your kid’s not going to make a good decision about how much screen time they should have. They’re not going to make a good decision about bedtime or dessert. You are the person to make that decision, and your kid is allowed to be upset about it.”
Kennedy
3. You don’t need to manufacture hardship.
It doesn’t take a major crisis to build resilience. In fact, it’s most effectively cultivated through repetitions of “good stress,” or eustress, Klein says — such as the start of a new school year, not making the cast of the school play or frustration over a school assignment. After children navigate those more minor stressors and process them with the support of reliable adults, they’re better prepared for the truly life-altering stressors they will eventually encounter.
“In order for the brain to handle stress, the brain needs to handle stress. You can’t wake up one day and have something bad happen, and your whole brain and body system go, I’ve never dealt with that before. … Positive self-talk comes from us saying, ‘You had a hard time, that was a big tantrum, and I’m still here for you.’ It tells your children, I’m not alone in the world, and these adults believe in me. They’ve helped me through this. It becomes their inner self-talk that says, I can figure this out.”
Klein
4. Fixing everything robs kids of opportunities to grow.
In the short term, when the stakes are seemingly low, it’s all too easy to remove obstacles from your child’s path when possible. Dash home and retrieve his forgotten violin. Cave when she begs for the water bottle du jour. And that’s OK every now and then. But in the long term, Klein and Kennedy say, it’s critical for adults to find opportunities to support their children through feelings of discomfort, rather than removing the discomfort entirely.
“The reason I think that our kids are having such a hard time building resilience in this generation is we aren’t willing to tolerate their distress. We have so many more distractions in our lives and conveniences in our lives that we’re like, I just don’t want to deal with this. ‘I’ll order the water bottle for you on Amazon. There you go.’ We have less patience for distress than our parents did for us. So if we want to help our kids be more resilient, I’m just gonna be honest, the answer has 0% to do with our kids. It has 100% to do with us.”
Kennedy
5. It all starts with a trusted adult.
To be resilient, a child needs to know not only that they can pick themselves up when they fall, but also that an adult will be there with a comforting hug, ready to cheer them on when they try again. It’s through the primary relationship that resilience develops, Klein says, pointing to decades of psychology and neuroscience research.
“As they go through life, they know that they’re safe — that’s going to always be paramount — but also that they are not alone in the world. Why is that so important? Because when they mess up or don’t want to feel like all is lost, they need that place where they’re not going to be judged, they’re not going to be shamed. That’s the relationship they internalize. Am I a good person? Is it OK when I mess up? … I don’t think as adults, we can even fathom how much our children need us.”
Klein