Article – Raising Resilient Children

Like many parents and caregivers raising children right now, I am struggling to balance the desire to protect my kids, and the need to ensure they can withstand the harsh realities they will likely face in their lives. I want them to be resilient.

I recently had the opportunity to gather with a group of Namaste Montessori parents to discuss resilience. We came to a group definition of resilience that is very much in line with and even goes beyond the definitions given by the American Psychological Association and the Oxford English Dictionary. Those definitions speak to the ability to recover and adapt when facing difficulties like trauma or stress and even to thrive despite these challenges. Our parents added the idea that resiliency includes having internal worth that is not negatively impacted by mistakes. We defined resilience as the ability to get back up when the world knocks us down, to accept failure and learn from experience, and to be willing to try something else when working toward a goal.

Dr. Maria Montessori observed that humans cannot help but try to better themselves, to learn, to grow, and to face challenges. She saw that tendency as our natural state, and any deviation from that state was because of some obstacle in one’s health or in the environment. We see this most clearly in the child learning to walk and getting up to try again repeatedly despite painful bumps and bruises. We all know that humans are born with amazing resilience, but we also see over a lifetime, that they can also fall into despair.

What factors lead to lifelong resiliency? Montessori education proponents would argue that children grow their confidence and self-worth by mastering difficult tasks. In Montessori classrooms, children are given a high level of autonomy, clear guidance, and then lots of time to try, fail, and try again until they are satisfied. We hand very young children liquid to pour, nut butter to spread, dishes to wash, and materials that call to their sense of order and need to organize and categorize the world. As they age we present them with materials that tangibly represent complicated concepts, and offer opportunities for individual or group exploration of traditional school subjects, all in the context of freedom and responsibility. And most children thrive with that freedom to work and challenge themselves. We communicate to children that we believe they can do hard things. We promote a “growth mindset” – brains and talent are the beginning, additional skills and abilities can be developed through effort.

But even in the classroom, and this is true of every teacher I talk to, Montessorians are seeing increases in hesitancy, increases in fear of failure, increases in resistance to challenges. There are likely a whole host of reasons for this shift in resilience, and it is definitely on the minds of parents as well, as they navigate the challenges of a fast-paced, entertainment-based, comfort-driven society.

In our group discussion, to reflect on our contribution to the development of resilience in our children, asked ourselves some questions:

As adults, when we think of what is challenging for us we immediately imagine big challenges like managing a household, working toward financial security, or the future of our country, but as parents, how we approach small daily tasks that are difficult may make more of an immediate impression on our young children. They are not aware of what we are thinking about or stressing about internally, but they do see how we react when a jar won’t open, or we cannot find something. Do we take a breath, commit to the challenge, and eventually celebrate our success? Or do we swear, stomp around, and lash out at those around us?

It is important to honor the fact that we are human and not beat ourselves up for being short tempered when we are struggling internally with all we have to manage. Montessori encouraged adults to be honest, but brief. We can share that we are worried about something, and then model catching ourselves and calming ourselves to prepare for the task at hand. It is not ideal to over explain, confuse our children, or give our children more to worry about. Keep it simple and provide assurance, for example “I got so frustrated, but it wasn’t because of the jar, it was because I am distracted and worried about when the car will be fixed. I know we will figure things out. I am feeling calmer now and will try to open the jar again.”

In our professional lives, some parents shared that they enjoyed challenges in their work, because they love their job and are passionate about it. This was an important point – interest is a big part of resilience. For our child to be willing to face challenges, we need to engage their interest; we need to engage them in our home and family life. And we need to start small – with sensory experiences of food, with the pushing of buttons, with water play, with scooping, lifting, pouring, carrying – single tasks that give a sense of completion. We need to prepare the environment so the child can take care of spills or other mistakes independently and we need to be friendly with error – resilience is accepting failure and learning from it, failure is required! Messes will happen.

Parents expressed moments of satisfaction because of their ability to solve problems, laugh about them, figure things out, learn new things, and accomplish difficult tasks. That is resilience. Making that experience tangible for our young children can help them see that process as both normal and rewarding.

When facilitating the development of resilience in our children, I encourage parents to think small and start with how they face daily life challenges. How do we model facing a huge pile of dishes, cooking dinner that the children will likely complain about, getting through the bags of laundry, or organizing our schedules when a car breaks down, and does our modelling encourage interest and participation from our children? Are we making the effort to meet the daily struggles of life at all appealing? The parents gathered all admittedly struggle with finding joy in daily life tasks. So where do our children get to witness our resilience – our ability to thrive in difficult or challenging situations? This is an honest question and one we didn’t have an answer to. But it is a poignant and important one.

There is so much focus on parenting, so many opinions, and so much pressure to do everything right, that parents are struggling to find joy. I believe joy is part of resilience, and even further, it is a form of rebellion against consumerism and the constant need for more. I think about times in history and places in the world where people face immense challenges and I think about how human beings, through all that time, have found ways to bring love and joy to the darkest situations. I think about the songs of slaves, the birthday parties celebrated in war zones, the people who still cook, clean, sing, dance, hug, marry, have children, and share in their joys and sorrows despite all the misery humans can create. Humans are amazingly resilient. Can we be those people too? Can we bring some joy to the washing of dishes regardless of the current state of the world? Practicing joy in daily activities is not something we do only for our children, it is something we do for ourselves.

The whining of young children, much like the crying of a baby, is meant to cause us distress, simply because the survival of our species one time depended on our responsiveness. But when our children are frustrated with a task, how we respond is communication about how we view our child. We need to ask ourselves if we are communicating trust in their competence because part of resilience is how we view ourselves.

Parents admitted that it is hard to resist jumping in to fix things when their child is struggling. We might just grab the front of the shirt they are wearing and button the buttons ourselves when our child whines about how difficult they are. Later in life, we might jump in to call the school when our child struggles with a peer or teacher, or jump in the car to bring their forgotten assignment. This is all part of our urge to care for our child and I would never tell parents not to help their children. Parents need to be advocates for their children. But we also need to be sure we are not robbing our child of opportunities to face difficulties and in turn grow their own sense of competence – which leads to resilience. During our discussion, the parents had several good suggestions for phrases.

When a child expresses frustration with a difficult task:

• What do you need right now?
• Show me what you are trying to do.
• Do you need help?

As a Montessorian, I suggest to parents that they help SLOWLY when they do help: To move slowly when assisting a young child to zip a coat so that they are motivated to grab it back and try again; and to build in delays when helping an older child: “Yes, but I need to finish this first so it will take a little while…” The lack of urgency both allows the child time to calm themselves and put in effort or jump in to participate when they have support, and it also communicates that the adult believes the child is capable. A favorite line I often used in the primary classroom when children asked for help was:  “I can help, but I will not do it for you – you have to help too.” It is a good line for parents as well, and a good reminder to include our child when you are helping them.

With older children who begin to share difficulties with peers or situations at school verbally, we collectively came up with some lines to use that help communicate trust in a child’s competence:

• Do want me to just listen, or do you need my help/suggestions/advice?
• Why do you think that happen?
• What did you do when that happened?

While every story of injustice that comes home may make us want to storm into the school, make an angry phone call, or even berate our child for their involvement, we communicate more trust in their competence when we just listen and do not rescue or judge. And we build a relationship that is more likely to stay open and honest. Children begin to censor themselves when they fear an adult will overreact, OR they may focus more on every difficult interaction in order to engage their caregiver’s full attention! Either way, their developing resilience is affected.

During our discussion, it was clear that we were a group of thoughtful and caring adults. We all want to allow our child opportunities to participate, to take their time to work through tasks, and through that effort to build resilience. There just isn’t time and it is easier to do things ourselves! But we need to be looking at the long game, not the mess erupting in front of us as our child tries to turn on the blender without securing the lid. If our long-term goal is resilience, then we need to allow space and time some failure, we need to give our children time to solve their own problems, we need to bring some levity and joy into our daily tasks and engage our children in real life activities. This might require limiting activities to allow for more time at home.

Another important obstacle to mention – and by doing so, to open a can of worms – is device use. Entertainment and escapism is destroying our patience and our resilience. When we can get our boost of happy brain chemicals from a screen, there is less motivation to work hard at difficult tasks in our lives, where the effort is far more tangible. When we can avoid the discomfort of waiting or ignore the pain of being human by turning on a device, we erode our ability to be uncomfortable. Social media and advertising is brutal to an individual’s self-worth, making it more difficult to avoid being swayed into believing we are not unique, amazing, resilient people. Montessori believed that removing distractions was vital to meaningful concentration. And concentration and focus are needed for working through difficulties, which lead to building resilience. We need to take an honest look at our long-term goal of raising resilient children and take a firm stand on device use. It might be easier to hand over a device than to listen to whining, and sometimes we all will need to do just that, but we have to understand that the frequency with which we turn to devices and allow our children to turn to devices, will directly affect their ability to face the discomfort of not knowing, the struggle of effort, or the pain of failure.

It is through our own effort that we find satisfaction – like the baby’s joy in learning to walk. Resilience is the ability to accept and learn from failure, and to be flexible and adaptive, and to face challenges – allowing an individual to thrive despite adversity. And we know humans are resilient as a whole. Montessori education provides tools for children to educate themselves through their own effort and pursue their innate interest to learn. But more than that, it is a philosophy of life in which we believe that individuals cannot help but pursue their potential when they have time, space, freedom, and minimal distractions. As parents, our job is not to make our children happy or ensure the road is smooth for them, but to engage them in life – to model our own resilience in small, tangible, and meaningful ways, to be friendly with errors, and to communicate our belief in their competence throughout their lives. In our homes, we can provide opportunities for them to participate, insist that they wait for help and participate if they want help, and remove distractions that are barriers to experiences of meaningful satisfaction. There will always be difficulties, we cannot prevent them, but we can help our children rise to meet them.