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Building Resilience in Kids
Teaching them to Overcome Failure and Embrace Growth
The secret of success? Resilience. That elusive blend of grit,
stick-to-it-iveness and rise-above-the-setbacks to match your innate talents with opportunity and serendipity.
Given the growing universe of unfettered childhood protection from failure, developing resilience in children has never been more important. Giving them what they need to botch and mangle their way to mastery is important early in life to avoid the pitfalls of derailed careers and problems in future life.
Understanding Resilience
Resilience, the ability to flourish in spite of stress and adversity, is an extraordinary power. This extraordinary characteristic has no ordinary nonhuman analogue, only a human one. In a symbolic inversion, humans reverse biological regulatory systems by overbraking or disengaging them entirely.
According to Dr. Ann Masten, a leading resilience researcher, it’s an “ordinary magic” that comes from ordinary, rather than extraordinary, adaptive systems in the human body and brain.
Why Kids Need Resilience
But our increasingly demanding and often-pressured environment poses myriad challenges for children —…
