4 Tips to Improve Children’s Psychological Resilience

“Resilience” refers to a set of traits in an individual that can help him or her successfully adapt to adversity and transform crises into positive forces.

How to help children and adolescents face difficulties and setbacks rationally and enhance their “resilience” is a concern for many parents and teachers.

For children and adolescents in adversity, resilience is the key force to help them “actively adapt” to adversity.

What is an important source of resilience? How can parents master effective methods to improve the psychological resilience of children and adolescents?

Let’s take a look together- Support is an important source of resilience.

Resilience is not entirely innate. Although studies have found that resilience has a certain genetic basis, the development of resilience depends more on risks and protective factors related to individual differences, family background and social characteristics.

For children and adolescents, the sense of support from family situations and community and school environments is an important source of their resilience formation and development.

The Trauma and Resilience Laboratory of Nanjing Normal University found through a questionnaire survey of primary school seniors and junior high school students in Jiangsu and Zhejiang that positive family education, a good school atmosphere and sufficient peer support are crucial to the development of adolescent resilience. Specifically, from the perspective of family structure, changes in parents’ marriages or parent-child separation will, to a certain extent, lead to a decrease in children’s daily sense of security and support after encountering challenges, and they are prone to lose the ability and initiative to seek emotional and psychological support from their parents, causing certain damage to resilience.

However, if children are overprotected or spoiled, it will limit their opportunities to grow in difficulties and improve their resilience; At the same time, leaving them alone or refusing to provide help will strengthen children’s sense of helplessness after setbacks, which is not conducive to the cultivation of resilience.

In addition, high-quality social networks and rich social support are crucial to the formation of resilience.

By promoting social connections between children and their classmates and neighbors, it helps to form a supportive and encouraging ecological environment, promote the improvement of children and adolescents’ sense of self-worth and efficacy when facing pressure and frustration, help them cope with adversity with the mentality and ability of “I can cope with pressure and problems”, and promote the development of resilience.

Correctly understand the impact and mechanism of resilience

The main function of resilience is to promote individuals’ positive adaptation to stress and difficulties.

From the perspective of offsetting the negative impact of adversity, resilience allows individuals to use more protective abilities to reduce the negative impact of adversity on physical and mental health;

From the perspective of emotional flexibility, individuals with a high level of resilience can flexibly regulate their emotions and adjust their emotional responses according to the environment and actual needs, thereby optimizing the use of their own resources, reducing unnecessary internal consumption, and forming a long-term and stable ability to cope with difficulties.

Studies have shown that a higher level of resilience can directly reduce depression and anxiety symptoms. At the same time, resilience can also buffer and reduce the impact of accumulated environmental risks (negative factors in family, school, peers and community) on depression and anxiety symptoms.

In addition, some studies in recent years have found that resilience can also help individuals transform adversity or crisis into positive power and promote positive changes in individuals facing various traumatic events.

This shows that resilience can not only help individuals cope with traumatic events, but also help individuals achieve post-traumatic growth and turn crises into opportunities.

Some parents still have some misunderstandings about the concepts of “resilience enhancement” and “frustration education”.

For example, some parents believe that being very strict with their children or deliberately creating opportunities for their children to suffer, suffer, be cold-shouldered and punished is to cultivate their children’s resilience. In fact, this understanding is one-sided and cannot really help children form and improve their ability to cope with adversity.

Many children who grow up in an environment where frustration is deliberately created and support is lacking will show a state of depression, violence, indifference and alienation.

Perhaps they can tolerate criticism and punishment better than spoiled children, but they may also be more likely to get stuck in a dead end or go to extremes.

Master the effective methods to improve the resilience of children and adolescents

The “Resilience Lights Up Life” research team of the School of Psychology of Nanjing Normal University has verified in practice that the cultivation and improvement of the resilience of primary and secondary school students is most effective from the following aspects.

First, help children establish a positive cognition of adversity and pressure.

A study published in the journal Nature found that when children and adolescents are helped to realize and accept that “pressure can bring opportunities and growth”, they are more effective in coping with pressure, which is the development of a positive “stress attitude”.

 … In fact, toughness does not mean “forcing oneself to endure” or that one has to shoulder everything by oneself.

When facing huge setbacks and pain in one’s heart, everyone instinctively needs the emotional recognition and support of others.

Strong social support can not only buffer the sense of pressure, but also bring richer and more effective problem-solving methods, thereby helping to improve children’s positive psychological qualities.

Third, teach children to learn the ability to flexibly regulate emotions.

For example, learn to stimulate their own positive emotions, regulate negative emotional experiences, cultivate their own control and awareness of emotions, not be afraid of frustration, accept disappointment and powerlessness, and adjust emotions to a state full of peace and hope at a relatively fast speed.

Fourth, guide children to maintain confidence and belief in the future.

Leading children and adolescents to establish positive confidence and belief is a major plan for mental health education.

In addition to psychological education in cognition, emotion and behavior, cultivating children and adolescents’ inner sense of certainty and belief in the future is an educational direction that educators and parents need to keep in mind and practice.

When children and adolescents encounter difficulties, if they can see the positive response of their families and society, and the optimistic explanations of their parents and peers, especially if their parents can face setbacks and pressure with their own actions, and always maintain hope and expectations for the future, it will have a great positive effect on their children, and the difficulties and pressures they are facing at the moment will also be eliminated mentally.

In short, to enhance the resilience of children and adolescents, we should neither overprotect them nor ignore their difficulties and needs. Instead, we should face difficulties together with them, give them all-round support in cognition, thinking, emotion and skills, help them develop the ability and confidence to resist setbacks, and finally accompany and guide them to have a strong heart, so that they can calmly deal with various difficulties and challenges on the road to growth.