Health & Wellbeing: Understanding resilience

Resilience is the ability to cope with difficult challenges and function in the face of adversity. This means having the mental strength to pick yourself up and keep moving forward after something tough and challenging has happened. As no circumstance is ever the same, being resilient means you can identify the most suitable strategies that help you react appropriately. Being resilient requires self-efficacy – the belief that we can create and navigate our own path through adversity.

What does resilience look like in a child?

Highly resilient children learn ways that suit them to get through difficult challenges, mistakes or difficulties without collapsing. They problem-solve, persevere and show resourcefulness. They also learn to describe their situation with a well-developed emotional vocabulary and in doing so learn to forgive others, build hope and compassion, which helps them retain their sense of self in difficult times. Children who are resilient will grow up to be more confident, curious and adaptable.

How do children build resilience?

Children need emotionally resilient teachers who understand how to support them through patience and compassion. Sometimes it is easy to judge and label a child as a ‘drama queen’ because of emotional responses. We can help children build resilience by:

• helping them to make friends and develop relationships across the nursery with adults and peers
• providing opportunities for open-ended play to encourage curiosity and exploration into the unknown
• teaching them the vocabulary to describe their feelings
• reading them stories where the characters overcome adversity
• doing yoga and calming activities indoors and outside
• scaffolding learning so they practise persevering and navigating challenges
• praising the process of learning and not just the end result; being praised for just being ‘worth it’ has a very damaging effect
• engaging in a community event, for example, visiting a local elderly group or a local community garden; getting engaged in an activity that is bigger than you can help develop resilience and better management of adversity
• celebrating small victories often.

Helping our children to build resilience and confidence is one of the most important gifts that we can give them.

FURTHER READING

Think Feel Do: A Wellbeing Handbook for Early Years Staff by June O’Sullivan and Lala Manners