Building Resiliency in Youth

Building Resiliency in Youth

Sometimes – despite our best intentions and efforts – bad things happen to children. While we must all do what we can to prevent youth and families from experiencing trauma and adversity, we also need to do what we can to ensure individuals are able to recover when something bad does happen. Building a child’s resiliency before and after trauma is a vital piece of helping youth to not only survive but thrive. But how do we do this?

Resilience can seem like a vague concept at times. Sometimes resiliency is perceived as “toughening up” a child which tends to equate with teaching children to suppress or ignore very normal feelings of fear, sadness, hurt, and anxiety in response to stressful situations. Sometimes resiliency is used synonymously with “coping.” While coping skills – those strategies we teach kids to use in a stressful event or when they experience “big feelings” - are a part of resiliency, there is much more to it. Resilience is an individual’s overall capacity to positively adapt and recover from stressful events or adversity. Harvard Center on the Developing Child states resiliency comes from an interaction between individual biology and protective factors in the environment. Individual biology can influence a child’s “starting point” in terms of resilience. Some kids are born more like orchids – they thrive best in certain environments under specific conditions – while others are born more like dandelions. Dandelion children tend to thrive in a greater variety of environments and under incredibly challenging conditions. But biology is not destiny. Protective factors play an equally – if not more – vital role in resiliency. Protective factors include nurturing relationships with others, adaptive skills like social emotional learning, and positive experiences. Resiliency starts early through positive “serve and return” interactions with nurturing caregivers during which children learn whether their needs will be met and how to identify and regulate their own emotions under the guidance of and modeling by their caregivers. While these early interactions provide a solid foundation for subsequent development, resilience can grow from any nurturing relationship or positive experience across an individual’s entire lifespan through. Nurturing relationships can be with parents, daycare providers, aunties and uncles, grandparents, teachers, faith leaders, mentors, coaches and so many others. And those positive experiences can be everyday things that many people may take for granted like having a park in your neighborhood, going on a school field trip, having a family game night, or participating in sports or clubs. There is a great video here that likens resiliency to a scale and explains how positive experiences and opportunities create more resilient communities. Whether it’s mentoring youth or advocating for school funding for arts programs, these actions can “tip the scale” for a child and help them thrive. We can all take action, big and small, to help build resilience in our own communities and families.