What Does Raising Resilient Children Mean?

Note: The transcript below may not be exactly the same as the podcast because it has not been edited for accuracy

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

children, resilience, resilient, skills, parents, experiences, feelings, challenges, people, raising, foster, caring adults, important, support, happening, navigating, tools, building, educators, preschool

HOST: Tara Gratto

Tara Gratto  00:01

Hello and welcome. I'm Tara, the founder of raising resilient children, where I support parents and educators with tools and skills for feelings, kindness, and everyday mental well being also known as social emotional skills and empathy. As a longtime educator, former preschool owner and parent, I know that there is no cookie cutter approach to raising children and information can be overwhelming. Let's tackle some of this by having some important conversations and digging into some different topics. What does raising resilient children mean? In today's episode, I'm going to be talking about what resilience means when it comes to raising children. Given the name of this podcast and my brand, I think it makes a lot of sense that I touch on this and why it's important to have this conversation, especially in how I see it relating to fostering essential life skills. I also think it's a really great way to recognize that there's a cross section of parenting experiences that are very unique to us and our individual circumstances. By looking at resilience as something we want or need to foster. This can really help guide us with developing skills and tools that fit the needs and goals of our children and family. I believe there is no cookie cutter approach to parenting or raising children. And I think this is something that is really important to recognize, as much as we share common experiences that can really link us together. We are also all unique individuals, and that plays a key role in child development. All right, so let's dig in. I'm embarking on a new experience here with launching a podcast. I feel like there are some really good links between growing a small business and raising children. You try it things, some things go really well. And other things go really poorly. And no matter what, you have to rebound with confidence and learn from each experience. It's a solid mix of pressure and reward. I love what I do, but it's also stressful and difficult. I bet this is something that you can relate to. As I was reflecting on starting this podcast and asking myself, Where do I even begin? It seemed to me that the best place to start is what it means to raise resilient children. At the outset of the pandemic, when I was working on developing a name for my brand, and asking former preschool clients what things they felt I best represented. There were two main themes. I help build skills that foster resiliency, and I am deeply passionate about kindness. There was no way to know at that time that resiliency was about to become such an overused word, and often so inaccurately. But I continue to stick with it. Because a big part of who I am is my work and advocacy, my long standing interest in mental well being and the everyday things we can do to support children and families. We keep hearing that mental health is health, but we aren't really doing much about it in the big picture. It's one of those things that keeps getting tossed around. But really, nobody knows who seems to be responsible for doing it. Is it parents, educators, counselors, and so on? Well, here's what I think. I think it's on all of us. Here's what I also know from experience. When you empower parents and educators with everyday and practical tools and skills for navigating social emotional well being. That's the ability to identify your feelings, have tools for those feelings, and know that others have feelings, too. That means you as well, parents, everyone benefits you, your children and the communities they belong to. When people share with me that they feel like this is more of a role for school, I will often say, the reason you want to learn this as a parent is because you're the one who will deal with the challenges the most. You are the safe space, so you will see and deal with the most feelings. You're also the one who's gonna get the phone calls from daycare and school. Ultimately, you're going to feel more confident learning them. If I know something as a parent, feeling confident goes a long way to supporting my mental well being. The truth is Parenting is hard, and there is no handbook but learning tools and skills for navigating feelings can give you some insights and support you with the challenges. When we really stop and think about it at the core of almost everything we do. Every decision we make. Every thought we have is a feeling. Funny how we haven't prioritized building skills for this when it's literally a piece of everything we do.

Tara Gratto  04:40

So what does all this have to do with resilience? Well, at its core resiliency is the ability to navigate and recover from challenges or difficulties, to be flexible in the face of adversity and bounce back. I don't know about you, but in the last two years, I've heard the word resilience we used a At truthfully, too much, it's especially annoying because it's being used to dismiss a whole range of challenging experiences, children's experiences, people's experiences, businesses experiences. I live in Ontario, and there was a political ad on TV the other day, that was a perfect example of what I'm talking about. We have proven to be resilient here in Ontario and managing the pandemic. Well, no, actually, we haven't. And this is certainly is not a universal truth. Resilience doesn't simply exist or just happened by chance. It requires some essential elements in place. Otherwise, it's just an excuse to avoid addressing difficulty or overlooking something that really needs attention. Unfortunately, this is how the word is most often used, as it was in the ad I had just heard. Now let's extend this idea to children. How many times have you heard over the last couple of years, don't worry, children are resilient, it'll be fine. Kids will be resilient simply because they are is not actually true. There's too many layers and your circumstances play a key role in this, some children will be stronger for this experience, and others will not. This is critical to understand. At its core resilience means you need to have some really important things in place. First, your basic needs need to be met things like water, food shelter. Second, you need a safe environment, both a mental and physical one. You need support, authentic, connected support. And in the case of children, you need connection. And often that connection is with a caring adult. You need tools and skills for social emotional well being things like the ability to reflect the things like emotional regulation, right? When we have big feelings, what do we do with those feelings? You need perseverance and self confidence. Those things don't happen by magic. They have to be built and developed. So what I'm suggesting is that raising resilient children means acknowledging that mental health is an important part of development, just like physical health is that our ability to successfully bounce back from challenges has some essential components. Is this true for everyone? Are there some people who don't have the characteristics and are still resilient, or perhaps because blanket statements don't work for everything. But I think if you were to really dig in, you'd find some of these key components were present. Ultimately, though, people are unique. And this is where these skills become so critical. And this is something I talk a lot about in the work that I do. Let's dive into the bigger picture, and what is happening and what is not, and who is able to rebound from those challenges with greater success. I do think there are some key components that we should be considering. Ultimately, helping children be successful in the face of their challenges and difficulties is an essential life skill, challenges, adversity, failure, defeat, disappointment, all of these things are our core components of the human experience. And some people handle those better than others. In part because of what I'm talking about here today. There are so many layers to this conversation that I will tackle on different episodes. But a major sea theme is that we have to start thinking about building social emotional skills the same way we think about teaching children to read, to write, to swim, to dance, to sing, to do all the things. The world is changing. We are opening space for feelings, but we are losing balance in this shift. Without tools and skills for feelings, we are spinning out a little bit and in some cases, actually quite a lot. And a lot of people are struggling to cope as a result. Parenting is shifting. It's shifting from predictable to somewhat chaotic and people are grasping. Many of us come from the generation of suppression, the more you suppress your feelings and control them. The stronger you are, the more respected you are there for the definition of resilience. However, I'm seeing the opposite is now happening. We shifted the pendulum from one end to the other suppression to free for all in our efforts to do better and be different than previous generations, we've tipped the balance a little too far in the other direction. Without balance, we are no better off. For me. balance is achieved by actively teaching and learning skills and tools for social emotional well being as a part of our daily routines. There's another really important piece of this conversation that I would be remiss if I didn't touch on at the core of my belief system is that we coexist. As much as our individual skills are so important. They can never be at the expense of realizing that we live in communities. children attend daycare, preschool school, after school programs live on family units, diverse situations. All of these rely on one or very few adults and many children. It is a physical impossibility to provide high level co regulation in the circumstance It says, I'll touch on what co regulation is in more detail in a future episode. But one of the reasons I believe so strongly in our responsibility to help children build skills and tools, is this is where I'm seeing such a lack of balance, and it's playing out poorly for everyone involved. Nobody likes the phone call from daycare school, the person calling the person answering. So let me return to that question I posed earlier, whose responsibility is this? Right, whose responsibility is social emotional development. It's all of us because we coexist. But at the base, children will always look to their caring adults for guidance in navigating these types of things, because they really are at the core of what makes us who we are. When you start to think about fostering and developing resilience as part of your commitment to parenting, you might start to realize that we have to get intentional about some things that might not have been so obvious before, or reminding to flip our focus. Things like making room for mistakes and not always fixing them, not avoiding uncomfortable feelings, instead, actively building skills for them. Teaching reflective thinking skills to help us process those difficult moments, creating a supportive environment for those ups, downs and everything in between ensuring that we are looking at systems of equity to address needs. One of the reasons this word resonates so much with my work is because it's different for different people. So much of what I'm about is recognizing there's no cookie cutter. But there are different recipes we can try, the product might not come out exactly the same but the ingredients are all there. There are some children who need to be supported with basic needs connection and support. Those children and families need very different types of resources to foster resilience. There are others where part of fostering resilience is getting really intentional about building life skills and not fixing mistakes. This is where it's essential to not use resilience as an excuse for overlooking but instead as a guide for what it is we need. Because remember, we have to coexist. Neither of these experiences are needs to come at the expense of the other. Resilience is needed by all, but what we need to get there will look very different for different families and children. Ultimately, my goal here is twofold. One to be an advocate for change at the systemic level. Some of my conversations will be about those kinds of topics. My other goal is to support parents, educators and caring adults with easy practical and accessible ways of building tools and skills for feelings, kindness, and everyday mental wellbeing for raising resilient children. Thanks so much for listening. Be sure to subscribe so you will be notified when future episodes launch and share this episode with friends or colleagues you think might enjoy it. For information on how to connect with me, you can check out the show notes or you can find me on Instagram at raising resilient children. Until next time, thanks again for listening.

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