The recent fires in Los Angeles (not far from where I live) have me thinking a lot about resilience. As I hear more and more stories of families who are displaced, who have lost their homes, I’m overwhelmed by thoughts of the resilience that these individuals, families, and communities will need in order to recover.

You’ll Learn:

• What resilience is and why it’s so important to start practicing at a young age
• Why parents try to prevent pain for the kids (and why we shouldn’t)
• 3 strategies for helping your child build resilience

When we experience adversity, it’s almost like we’re being forged in a fire to become stronger and more beautiful. So as parents, how can we develop resilience in our kids so that they can overcome adversity and hard things throughout their lives? 

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Preventing Pain

We want our children to face disappointment with bravery, courage, and strength. But at the same time, we often try to prevent them from ever experiencing hardship.

When your kid is struggling, you might feel guilty because you see their discomfort as a kind of failure on your part. Try shifting your thinking to, “Hard things are gonna be inevitable, and my job is not necessarily to prevent those things. My job is to equip my child so that they are able to experience pain, discomfort, and hardship, and overcome it so that they become more and more resilient.”

Another big reason why parents don’t like their kids to experience hardship is because they feel ill-equipped to deal with their child’s big feelings (and the crying and complaining that come with it). Parents even fear that going through hard things will “break” their kids. 

The truth is, humans aren’t actually that breakable. And you can’t prevent your kids from ever getting hurt or going through tough things. Even if you did it “perfectly”, it is impossible to stop anything bad from ever happening to your child. And you’ll burn yourself out in the process.

Kids are going to face challenges from potty training accidents to not getting into the college of their choice and many, many experiences in between. Life is filled with beauty and pain and loss. Hard things and really beautiful things. 

In fact, you don’t really even want to protect your kids from all hardship. Preventing problems (or trying to) creates a different set of problems. It’s important for our kids to experience small disappointments so that they feel confident in their ability to overcome those hard things. Give them your support, care, and love through tough times. 

Resilience is really all about this internal belief that’ “I'm okay. I can handle it. I'm good enough. I can figure things out.” It's a mindset that comes from the inside.

If you let your kids go through little hardships as they age - struggling to put on their shoes, going back up to the bedroom and remaking their bed, losing their water bottle and having to pay $10 to buy a new one - it will give them that inner belief that they can handle it.

Building Resilience

It’s natural for big feelings to come along with a difficult or uncomfortable situation. Processing feelings allows us to overcome them. 

When you give your kids space to cry, to grieve, to be sad, mad, hurt, frustrated, or afraid, their nervous system will find its way back to equanimity, balance, and calm. You can give them the tools to process those negative emotions.

Don’t rush to problem solving or finding the silver lining. Building resilience really comes from allowing the pain, hurt, sadness, anger, or frustration to be fully digested and processed by the nervous system. Trust that your child can handle those feelings. 

If it seems that your kid is getting stuck in the big feeling cycle, suggest a short break to take a walk or have a snack. You can also put boundaries around their processing. For example, “I'm happy to talk to you more about the sad thing that happened tomorrow. Right now, it's time for bed.”

Allow time for them to get through some of their emotions, and then guide them as they learn to solve their own problems. Give them the idea that they have the answer inside of them. Start to offer some solutions, but in a way that makes them think.

You can help bring it out by asking really good questions:

• Why do you think that happened? 
• What do you want to do next? 
• What would be the best solution for you? 
• How do you want to handle this? 
• Do you want to try…?

For example, if your kid gets cut from the baseball team, what can they do to get better and make the team next season? Encourage them to keep working at it, and let them know it’s not over. They can work at getting the grades they want. They can work at getting a friendship back. They can work at getting privileges back that they’ve lost.

Let them know that, no matter what happened, they’re safe and they are okay exactly as they are. They can always try again. 

You also want to remind them that they are separate from the circumstance. Your kid is not a bad person because they made a mistake or didn’t make the team or got a bad grade or didn’t get invited to a birthday party. Those external circumstances don't mean as much as what's going on inside. We can be sad about things that happen on the outside, but it doesn't define who we are.

Tell them, “You're gonna fail. You're gonna make mistakes. Things are gonna be hard. Some days are gonna be great. Some days are gonna be crappy. And I'm not worried about you. You will figure out how to grow up and to be strong and become the person you're meant to be.”

In order to help your kid develop resilience, help them feel their feelings, problem solve, try again and continue building that inner belief that they're okay exactly as they are.

When a problem is presented to them, they will be able to say, “Okay. I can handle this.” And that is everything. 

Whatever is hard for you right now, let yourself feel all the feelings, and then wait. The solutions will come. Your brain will draw you toward them. You will figure it out. 

Previous Episodes:

• Episode 153: My Parenting Regrets
• Episode 94: Social Engineering in Parenting with Jennifer Delliquadri

Free Resources:

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✨ A simple tool to stop yelling once you’ve started (This one thing will get you calm.)

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✨ Exactly why you yell. (And how to stop yourself from starting.)

✨A script to say to your kids when you yell. (So they don't follow you around!)

Download the Stop Yelling Cheat Sheet here

Connect With Darlynn: 

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• Rate and review the podcast on Itunes

Welcome back to become a calm mama. I'm your host. I'm Darlyn

Childress. And today on the podcast, I want to talk

a little bit about resilience and what that means

and also how to cultivate resilience in your kids.

Recording this, the week of the fires in Los Angeles, the

Eaton fire and the Palisades fire. And it's a

interesting topic to be talking about resilience in the in the

aftermath of such a huge natural disaster

that occurred in the area where I live and knowing

about families who are displaced and families who've lost their homes and

the major tragedy that's occurred and the resilience

that is needed in order to recover

from this disaster and from all of the

small tragic stories that are coming through the new news,

just family after family after family that lost everything.

It's been making me think a lot about resilience, and I

wanna talk about how to develop resilience in your children.

But I really am just thinking about the resilience that I'm

seeing in an entire city and in

communities and in families and in individuals.

And I'm very inspired by the the reality that

most of us experience hard things in life,

and most of us are able to overcome that

adversity. And there's this feeling when you're a parent

that you want to make sure your kids are resilient. Right? You want

them to be able to overcome

hard things and to really

grow from that adversity. So having them experience

adversity and then have them grow and change and

almost be forged like in a fire to become

stronger and more beautiful. There's this, like, tension in

parenting where we want our kids to be strong and resilient

and have a good attitude and face disappointment and

hardship with with bravery and

courage and strength. And at the same time, we wanna

prevent them from ever experiencing hardship. And then we're

frustrated when we look at them and we are sort

of discouraged because they don't seem to be made of

tough stuff. Right? But they maybe haven't gone through tough things.

And at the same time, we're preventing them from experiencing tough things

because we don't want them to get hurt. The reality is

that adversity is always going to come.

You are going to experience hard things. People are gonna pass away.

You're gonna lose things. There's gonna be illnesses and accidents

and financial burdens and that I don't mean to say it in such a negative

way. It's just sort of true that life is filled

with beauty and pain and loss

and and hard, hard things and really

beautiful things. I think sometimes as parents, we

worry that our kids are gonna have like, if they're going

through something hard, we're worried that it's gonna break them.

And the truth is that we're not that breakable

as people. We're actually very strong and very

resilient. We want to work hard to get what we

want. We want to overcome hard things

and do hard things in order to get to the next

whatever it is that we want or to have to get what we want.

And so I really wanna help you understand that preventing

problems creates problems, because we wanna

give our kids the opportunity to have small disappointments

and small hard things, so that they feel

confident in themselves that they can overcome those hard

things. So when I hear a parent talk about being worried

that their kid's gonna grow up and they're not gonna have a good self esteem

or or that they're gonna be rejected and bullied by their peers, get

depressed, that they won't be successful, I

hear them saying, I don't know if my kid is gonna have an emotional health

if they're not going to be emotionally healthy.

One of the ways that you help your kids

become emotionally healthy is by letting them

experience hard things, have your support, have your care and

your love, and give them the tools to overcome

that. Your kids are going to go through

hard stuff. And if you prevent that, if you

social engineer, you micromanage, you hyperplan, you bulldoze

this smooth path for your kids, you're preventing

your child from experiencing the hard thing that they actually need

to grow. Even if you did it perfectly, even if

you prevented all shitty circumstances, if you tried

to prevent anything bad from happening to your kid, that would not be

possible because something it's bad things are gonna happen.

Like, they just do. Loss is inevitable,

and childhood loss is also inevitable. It's just true.

Even small little losses like losing a toy at a

friend's house or have leaving something in the rain and it gets ruined

or not finishing an assignment and, you know, un being

unable to go out on recess. The small

things that we kind of try to prevent our kids from

experiencing hardship, forgetting their water bottle bottle bottle water bottle,

things like that, that when we try to

prevent that stuff, it's inevitable that it'll happen anyway.

But it also by preventing it, it makes us work so hard.

Like, you're working so hard to prevent something that you don't even wanna be

preventing because we want our kids to experience in hardship. Now the

reason why we don't like them to experience hardship a lot of times is because

they complain and they cry and they they're sad

and they have their big feelings, and we feel ill equipped to help them with

those feelings. We feel so guilty that we didn't do

it right or do our best or give them what they needed. And

we make their discomfort be as if it's

a failure on our part that we did something wrong and therefore our

kid is experiencing something hard. And I rather you

be able to think about hard things are gonna be inevitable, and my job is

not necessarily to prevent those things. My job is to

equip my child so that they are able

to experience pain, discomfort, and hardship, and

overcome that and let them become more and more

resilient. When your kids are upset and they're having a

big feeling cycle because they've experienced a hardship,

whether it's because of an accident or because

of a friendship that falls apart or a mean

teacher or, you know, they think that they're gonna be able to,

like, get away with not doing something and they still get in trouble.

Whatever the hard thing is, your kids are going to

have feelings about it. And it's the ability

to process the feelings that we have in the

midst of hard things that makes it possible for us

to overcome them. When you give your kids

the tool to process negative emotion,

where you give them space to cry, to grieve, to be

sad, to be mad, to be hurt, to be frustrated, to

feel afraid, If you give them space to

feel their feelings, their brain and their

nervous system will find its way back

to equanimity, to balance, to calm.

Our nervous systems are meant to go through

hard things and then come back down from them. Your

child's nervous system is the same. Now the circumstances,

the things that they find frustrating, overwhelming,

difficult, sad, the circumstances might

be different than things that might trigger your nervous system.

But the truth is all of us are human and we all have nervous systems

and we all have emotional experiences. And it's really the

ability to manage those feelings and move through them and process

them. I think of it as like digestion that you want your kids

to be able to go through a hard adversity

and then build some perspective. Think about the episode I did on

regret. How you want to be able to look back at something,

feel peace about the circumstance, and then find the pieces

that are left over after something hard

and learn and grow from them. The cool thing is that

when you give your kids the opportunity to

experience hard things or you just they just happen

because they happen, that's what life is like, That

you let them feel their feelings and then trust that they're going to feel their

way all the way to the problem solving stage.

This is what I see sometimes when people are going through something

hard, either a child or a community or an individual or peer,

is that we often rush to silver line the

situation. Instead of making room for the hard

feelings and allowing a grieving process to happen, we

try to rush rush it and silver

line it. Like, oh, well, at least you still have blank or at least this

happened or, you know, you'll get them next time, tiger. Like, we

rush to the solution. We rush to the resolution.

We rush to the good thing.

And that's not really how resilience is built.

Resilience is built by experiencing the hard thing and

allowing the pain and a negative

emotion, the the hurt, the sadness, the anger, the disappointment,

letting that be digested, be processed by the nervous system,

and be allowed. Making room for those hard

feelings, not going to silver line something so fast

while also trusting that your child can handle their big feelings.

If they start to get stuck in that

their feeling cycle, you can say, you know what? This is a lot. Let's

go take a walk. You know what? This is a lot. Let's make this snack

now. Or you can put a boundary. I'm happy to talk to you more about

the sad thing that happened, the teacher or the friendship or the

coach or whatever the hard thing is tomorrow

night. You know, it's time for bed now. Let's read a story, or

I'm gonna start dinner now. Like, you can put a boundary if

the feeling cycle is going long and long and long, but I don't want you

to rush to solve it. The first thing is making room

for hard feelings. When bad things happen,

letting the feelings happen. And I'm

seeing that in the community in Los Angeles, like, people

this past week have been quiet. They have been

allowing for the pain. Those people who

aren't experiencing the pain have been feeling the sadness

of the city, and there's been, like, a quiet a

quietness to Los Angeles. And some people are

starting to get into action, but we can't really start the rebuilding yet. Now

it's just about solving the most immediate

problems of, like, housing and water and food

and clothing and and basics.

It's like, let's get everybody stable before we try to

make things right or better. So you want

to give your whoever your experience, whoever's going

through something hard, wanna give a lot of space for

that emotion emotional experience, the grief process to happen.

Once someone has gone through some of their emotions, that's

when it's really time to start to problem

solve. And, really, what you wanna be developing in

your child is their ability to solve their own problems.

You wanna guide them towards solutions, but really asking really good

questions. Like, why do you think that happened?

What do you wanna do next? What would be the best solution for you? How

do you wanna handle this? And giving them the idea

that they have the solution inside of

them, giving them the belief that they can handle

something hard. So imagine

that they didn't do their homework assignment, and or they didn't get the best

grades and they don't get to go on the big trip or something like that.

And say, yeah. Okay. That makes a lot of sense. Of course, you're sad. You

know, validating and giving some time, letting them be mad and raging or whatever they've

gotta go through. And say, okay. What do you wanna do about it

now? You're not going or you got cut from the team

or, you know, you have had this, you know,

broken leg because you, you know, now you can't go to the beach with all

your friends. What do you wanna do now?

Do you wanna sit around and mope or do you wanna make the most of

it? Like, is there do you wanna watch a movie or do you wanna, you

know, practice baseball so that you're better for next season?

You can start to offer some solutions, but asking them like

what about this? What do you think about that? Do you wanna try this? And

letting them make some decisions within themselves.

Now, if your kid is not ready to go to solution, that's fine.

You can let them mope around a little bit, maybe letting them get

to that point where they're ready to come up with some ideas.

We wanna let our kids know that they get to try again.

So whatever the adversity is, we want our kids to be

keep working at overcoming the challenge.

So continuing to be on the baseball team and not just quitting even if they

aren't that great, so they can show themselves that they're strong and

that they can handle it. I think about when my son broke his

leg and how determined he was

to walk and how determined he was to get

back to school. And he was just like, what does it take? What do I

gotta do? And, of course, the first few 1st week or so

was really hard. He was in a lot of pain. He was really uncomfortable.

And then he started to go like, okay. What's next? What can I

do to get what I want? That's the thing that we're

talking about. That resilient spirit is like, I'm willing to do

the hard thing to get the next thing, to get the thing that

I want. And communicating to your kid, it's

not over. You can keep trying. You can work at

getting the grades you want. You can work at getting your friendship back. You can

work at getting your privileges that you've lost if you've

if they've gotten a consequence. So giving them this

belief in themselves that they can solve their own problems,

that they can try again, and then letting your kid

know that they're okay. They're you're no matter

what has happened, that they're safe and that you believe

that they are just they're okay exactly as they are.

Like, it they don't need to be better in order to be worthy. You

don't have to have made all the best grades or gotten on

the best of the baseball team or the, you know, made the position in the

dance recital or whatever got the best award. Like,

whatever they're sad about. We wanna make sure

that they feel that they haven't done anything wrong.

Another thing you want to remember about resilience is we

wanna make sure our kids can separate themselves from their

circumstance. So it's kind of like shame

is something that is wrong with me. Guilt is I did something wrong.

In that same regard, we wanna make sure that I

am not a bad person because I didn't I made

a mistake. I'm not a bad person because I didn't make the

baseball team or get that top grade or get

the position in the dance recital or didn't get invited to the birthday

party. That those are external circumstances and

they don't mean as much as what's going on

inside. That we can be sad about things that happen on

the outside, but that doesn't define who we are.

So I want you as the parent to be able to separate

your child's behavior or their circumstances

from their character, from who they are inside. Not

looking at your child from that lens of, like, well, they didn't get very

good grades or they're not being nice to everybody or they're not dressing well or

they're not being athletic or they're not being creative or they're not being funny. Like,

if you are trying to look on the outside

and and determine whether your kid is good on the inside based on the

outside, they're gonna do the same thing. So resilience is

really all about this internal belief that I'm okay,

that I can handle it, that I'm good enough, that I can

figure things out. It's a it's a mindset

that comes from the inside. And so no matter

what is going on on the outside of your child's life, you wanna make

sure you communicate to them. I'm not worried about who you are at your inside.

You're gonna fail. You're gonna make mistakes. Things are gonna be hard. Some days are

gonna be great. Some days are gonna be crappy, and I'm

not worried about you. You will figure out

how to grow up and become strong and be, you

know, the person you're meant to be. So this happens all the

way from when they're little and they have an accident potty training all the way

to maybe not getting into the college of their choice. All along the

way, your kid is going to have mistakes and mess

up. You wanna be helping them feel their feelings,

problem solve, try again and building that inner belief

that they're okay exactly as they are. What I've noticed is

that a lot of parents, like I said in the beginning of the podcast, is

that they'll try to prevent all of these hard things from

happening. They wanna make sure that their kid gets all the tutoring

and all the coaching and all the special treatment and the right

teacher and is, you know, looks the right way and all of

this extra extra work in order

to get their kid some sort of paved

golden road so that they don't get hurt.

And that's not for 1, it's not possible.

Okay? You cannot be perfect and prevent pain. It doesn't. It's not possible.

Your kid is gonna experience hardship no matter how hard you work.

I'd rather you spend more time building your belief up and your kids

belief that they can handle hard things. So

letting them experience adversity, not rescuing, not solving

all their problems for them. That means avoiding pre

solving problems like like I said through social engineering and

hyper planning and gossiping and all of these things that we do to try to

figure out is our kids safe? Are they good? What do we need to do?

Who do we need to move like a chessboard trying to manipulate the

world so that our kids can kind of walk straight through?

That doesn't produce the emotionally healthy kid that you

want because it doesn't give them the belief that

they can solve their own problems, that they can handle

hard things. Everyone will overcome the hardship of the fires, but the

people that are going to overcome it with more ease are

the people who can be thinking, where is the

solution? I've got it in me. I can figure this out.

Where are the resources? How can I get the support I need

and doing the work and taking the steps to rebuild their life?

That inner belief, that ability to feel the feelings all the way and

grieve and be sad and then believe in

yourself that you can now move forward. That is what

resilience is. If you let your kids go through hard

little hard things, little hardships as they age,

struggling to to put on their shoe, going back ups to the

bedroom and remaking that bed and losing their water bottle

and having to pay $10 to buy a new one and

going through small hardships will give them the

inner belief that they can handle hardship. When a

problem is presented to them, which it will, they will then say,

Okay. I can handle this. And that

is everything. Giving your kid the belief that they can handle it.

That's what we're working towards here. I wanna give

you the belief that you can handle whatever hardship is going on for you

right now. Grieve your grief. Feel your

feelings. Do the sadness. Feel the sadness. Feel the hardship.

Whatever it is that's hard for you right now, let yourself feel

all those feelings and then wait because the solutions,

the silver lining, they will come. Your brain will draw you

towards them. You do have the answers. You

will figure it out And I trust you and I

believe in you. Just like I believe that you can become the parent you wanna

be and that any hardship that's going on with your

kids or with you or with your family that

you have it inside of you to be the parent that you wanna

be, to just keep being curious,

being loving and forgiving yourself and being curious. What's the

next right thing? What can I do? How can I

overcome this hardship? Some of that means getting resources.

You know, someone who's lost their home, they're not like, let me do it by

myself and rebuild a house. Like, no. They're right? They're

gonna find the people who know what they're

doing and getting support. So if you need

support in your parenting, I highly recommend you, you know, reach out to me

and book a complimentary consultation. We'll talk through what's going

on, what hardships you're seeing, and make a plan so that you

feel more confident and more supported along your parenting journey.

So you can find out how to do that on my website, calmmama

coaching.com. And just book a little

call and we'll figure it out together. This is a message to you

that you don't have to work as hard as you think you have to work

at preventing all the problems and make sure your kids are always happy

because the truth is unhappiness is just as important

as happiness. Alright, mama. I will talk to you

next time.