What do you need to build resilience in children?
Your TOES: trust, optimism, emotion regulation, and sympathy
How to promote resilience?
Resilience is the ability to overcome hardships and positively adapt to negative experiences (Rutter, 2012). It’s the ability to be flexible in challenging situations and rebound from setbacks. Let’s think about an exercise band, also called a resistance band. It expands. It is stretchy. It bounces back to shape.
We use exercise bands to strengthen our bodies, to become more flexible, to improve our mobility. With practice, we eventually become flexible enough to touch our TOES! To help us remember the four social-emotional capacities that build resilience, we can think of it as increasing our flexibility to reach our TOES:
Trust
Trust is the basis of any relationship. It is the capacity to expect others to be goodwilled in social interactions (Yamagishi, 2011). Trust is also an important element in forming an attachment.
Here are some ways to build trust with children:
● Do what we say, say what we do: When we are consistent with our words and actions, we show others that we are reliable. When children know what they can expect from our behaviour, they can feel safe and build their trust in us.
● I’m sorry: Sometimes, we may not think to apologize to children when we are wrong. We may think it will change the way children view us…and it will! When we acknowledge that we’re in the wrong, we are showing children how to accept that our choices impact others and that everyone makes mistakes (even grown ups), but we can do the right thing and work to make things right. “I’m sorry that I didn’t believe you. You were right and next time I will be sure to listen to your side of the story.”
● I trust you: Affirming children’s choices and making them feel heard is valuable in building trust. For example, if a child says “I’m full! I don’t want more pasta” at the dinner table, we can respond “Okay, it’s good to listen to our bodies when they tell us we’re full. We can put your pasta away for now and you can have it later when you’re hungry.” The affirmation of “I trust you” not only builds the child’s confidence, but it also allows them to exercise their autonomy.
Optimism
Optimism is the belief that good things happen in life and that the future will bring positive outcomes (Speidel et al., 2021). Optimism has been linked to resilience in adverse contexts and traumatic experiences. It is also associated with happiness and better mental health (Speidel et al., 2021). How do we promote optimism in children?
Here are some ideas:
● Encourage curiosity: We can ask children questions and encourage their curiosity. For instance, the children have been looking forward to a planned picnic, but it starts raining. We can wonder aloud with them “Maybe we can picnic tomorrow. Do you think it will be sunny tomorrow?” Talking about the future can promote anticipation and positive thoughts.
● Embrace unexpected events: When something unexpected happens, acknowledge the change. For example, the much-anticipated picnic day turns into an indoor play date due to a sudden change of weather. We can first acknowledge their disappointment but also highlight the turn of events “I know you wanted to go to the picnic, but now we get to play with your friends!”
When we are pleasantly surprised, we can draw their attention to the surprise. For example, the bear makes an unexpected appearance out of its cave at the zoo, we can express our surprise “I thought it was their nap time, what a surprise the bear came out! We are so lucky!”
Emotion regulation
Emotion regulation is the ability to understand and manage our emotions in a way that enables us to achieve our goals and engage positively with others (Speidel, 2023). Having strong emotion regulation skills is a protective factor in the context of adversity. Not only is it a protective factor, but it is also an indicator of positive mental health (Speidel, 2021).
There are many ways to support children’s emotion regulation skills:
● Labeling and validating children’s emotions: When children are talking to us, we can give them our attention and validate that we hear them. A great way to affirm that we are listening is to repeat what they shared, “I heard you say that you’re angry that someone took the puzzle, is that right?” When children have their emotions being labeled back to them, they build self-awareness and become more informed of their own emotions.
● Open the conversation: Ask children open-ended questions and elaborate on their responses. For instance, we can start the conversation with a simple question: “What happened?” Then continue to ask open-ended questions to allow children to share their emotions in their own words. We can elaborate by acknowledging signs of their emotion such as, “I can see you jumping with excitement!”. We can also help children elaborate by prompting, “What else makes you feel excited?”
Sympathy
Sympathy is the capacity to feel concern for others in distress but not sharing the same feelings of distress (Eisenberg, 2000). This other-oriented capacity is important in building resilience by promoting prosocial behaviours and positive relationships (Speidel, 2021).
Some ways we can help children practice sympathy are:
● Drawing attention to others’ emotions: We can prompt children to share their thoughts on social interactions. This can be in real life, during play, or while reading together. For example, we can point out characters in the book and ask, “What do you think they’re feeling?” or “How would you feel if this happened?”
● Modeling: Children learn by observing and imitating. A great way to promote the development of sympathy is to model when we experience sympathy. By expressing our own sympathy, such as, “I feel so worried for our neighbour’s lost dog! I hope their dog comes back home soon.” When we model, children can learn different ways to express sympathy.
We can help children build resilience with practice, just like how we can increase our flexibility to touch our toes over time. Some days we feel like we can’t move an inch, but some days we surprise ourselves by how far we can stretch. With tools like the resistance band (or trust, optimism, emotion regulation, and sympathy), we can practice flexibility and bounce back from challenging days.
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