By Bernice Gan
We all desire to see our children display resilience and be able to recover or bounce back from challenges and setbacks in life. These challenges can include entering a new school, dealing with a different environment or coping with bullying.
Resilience develops when children experience challenges and learn to deal with them positively. Building resilience helps children not only deal with current everyday challenges, but also develop the basic skills and habits that will help them deal with challenges later in life, during adolescence and adulthood.
Resilience is important for children’s mental health. Children with greater resilience are better able to manage stress, which is a common response to difficult events.
Resilient children are more likely to take healthy risks because they don’t fear falling short of expectations. They push themselves to step outside of their comfort zones. This helps them reach their goals and solve problems independently.
So how can we help our children cultivate this? Here are the ABCs of resilience.
1. Allow children to grow through difficult emotions and situations

When children cry, let them express their emotions instead of telling them, “Don’t cry”. When they have calmed down, help them to process their emotions and understand why they were upset.
Avoid predicting, preventing and solving every little problem for our children.
When kids come to parents to solve their problems, the natural response is to lecture or explain. A better strategy is to ask questions. By bouncing the problem back to the child with questions, the parent helps the child think through the issue and come up with solutions.
For example, if children face disappointment, such as not doing well on a test or if a friend says something unkind, talk with them about their feelings and brainstorm what they can do next time. Letting them go through uncomfortable feelings can help them work things out for themselves.
We can also teach them delayed gratification by nurturing the ability to wait and defer pleasure. Allow them to cultivate perseverance by not always giving them what they want immediately and letting them earn their rewards slowly.
When they learn to overcome small challenges, it helps build their resilience to face bigger setbacks.
2. Build a strong, nurturing relationship with your child

Having positive adult-child relationships is key to raising resilient children. We may think of resilience as some kind of “inner strength” but what helps children through tough times is the presence of a supportive adult they can rely on.
Studies have shown that social support is associated with higher positive emotions, a sense of personal control and predictability, self-esteem, motivation, optimism, and resilience.
Some ways to build a loving relationship is to:
- Let them know they are loved unconditionally
- Give them one-on-one time that is free from distractions.
- Listen to them empathetically. See from their world and understand what stresses them.
- Affirm their emotions, both positive and negative.
- Have open and honest conversations with them.
3. Cultivate compassion & gratitude

We can help our children nurture compassion for others and themselves. For example, let them share our struggles. Let them into our world when we face disappointments so that we can model resilience for them. By practising self-compassion and being kind to ourselves when we make mistakes, we can help our child build self-compassion and move on from difficult experiences.
Help them to appreciate simple acts of kindness and acknowledge positive experiences.
For example, ask them to share over dinner one positive thing that happened in the day, what someone did to make them happy or what they did to make someone happy.
And let them know that it’s okay to ask for help. Children often have the idea that being brave is about dealing with things by themselves. But being brave is also knowing when to ask for help and learning how to receive help from others. This is showing kindness to themselves.
For more resources on building resilience in your child, visit the links below:
- 5 ways to build resilience
- Giving children permisson to make mistakes
- Using the pandemic to teach resilience
- Avoiding overprotection
To find out more about our preschools and curriculum, visit https://www.anglicanps.edu.sg.