Fostering a Child’s Resilience

This edition of Margin Notes is guest written by members of the Health & Wellness Team, Amy Anselmo and Jessi Soles.

With the focus on children's' wellbeing, we want to explore a part of that is sometimes forgotten—ensuring that your child learns the real-world skills needed to gain confidence and resilience. 

We can all remember when we first learned to tie shoelaces or ride a bike. While these seem like routine childhood experiences for us all, it's hard to overstate the confidence that these simple actions can bring to a child. And that confidence pays off in all areas, from gaining a greater sense of overall mental wellness to academic performance and building meaningful relationships. 

From the earliest years at Browning, we believe boys can advocate for what they want. Even in Kindergarten we are giving them choices. We expand upon that with age to strike the right balance between enabling children make small good choices, and helping them too much.

With our youngest students, our wellness team interacts with them in their classrooms so the boys know that its okay to come to us and advocate for their needs. We can help them identify their emotions because young children can have so many big feelings that are not able to separate or address. By the time they are in middle school they understand what they are feeling, but they can also be very reactive. It's also a time that friendships are changing, and some may have trouble with executive functioning and organizational skills which bleeds into their academic lives and leads to feelings of stress. The important thing for families to know is that we can't make the stress go away but rather, help them to manage it, as we all do. We also hope that other adults in their lives are modeling how to cope with disappointment so that they can see that it's not the end of the world when things don't go their way. We think it's important that children learn the lessons that failure has to teach all of us.  

Of course by Upper School, we really see the decision making process and life skills they have learned thus far come into play. How resourceful are they? What can they do when faced with decisions that can lead to poor choices around drugs and alcohol? Can they manage the basic self-care tasks that they will be expected to perform once they get to college? Do they understand how to manage their time or how to navigate, and put the appropriate controls on, their use of technology? These are all things that boys should be expected to achieve and practice, while at Browning and still living at home.

We do know that parents can really struggle with how much responsibility children can have or when something is age appropriate for their child. Ask us, or your child's pediatrician. We find children can often do more that their families think that they can. There's a value in being in certain situations that might feel a bit uncomfortable — such as navigating the subway alone versus riding in a private car. That doesn't mean that kids can't–or shouldn't–learn to travel through the city in a variety of ways. But prioritizing safety and comfort in all situations does a disservice to the development of life skills and ultimately mental health. 

It's an incredible feeling when children can handle something that their peers may not all be doing yet — it raises their self esteem, teaches them to problem solve, and establishes that they are competent to do tasks that they will eventually need to do on their own anyway.

While we sometimes want to avoid the repetition and frustration that comes with teaching children certain life skills, we suggest adults try to remember how accomplished they felt when they learned a new skill. That feeling is there for their children as well, it just needs to be facilitated by adults at home and at school.