Resilience could be described as a person’s psychological ability to cope with difficulties and maintain hope and functional capacity during adversity. A very important skill to learn. Resilience helps you tolerate stress better and often act more rationally. People with high resilience are flexible in their thinking and worry less. They focus on the present, use positive emotions to recover and find positive meaning after being exposed to stress.
However, no child is resilient until they reach safety and a normative environment. Resilience is a skill that can be taught and developed in a good direction also in a school context. The physical and psychological safety of the environment is an important part of this. Being mentally or physically insecure can influence the development of resilience in a weaker direction. Resilience is an asset that can be grown!
In addition to a safe environment, it is important for a child to be able to train, fail, and retrain in order to develop resilience. Stress tolerance cannot develop if it is not challenged. The task of the adult is to regulate the level of difficulty and load so that the experience remains safe, but the child is challenged to the zone of proximal development. In other words, let’s practice skills together so that the child can next cope with the skill on their own.
Some key principles can be identified to support the development of resilience. These main principles can be further dismantled in terms of content, but they provide a good starting point for developing a growth environment that supports resilience.
The art of listening is very important. Active listening, for example, is a good method for this. However, it’s not just about methods, it’s about a genuine ability to tune in to a child’s wavelength. In addition to just listening, non-verbal communication, such as gaze and tone of voice, is also important. Since it is not worth pretending to do this, it is positive if the teacher/caretaker her/himself has high resilience and a genuine interest and desire to hear.
Especially for children with inherently low resilience who may have lived in an unsafe environment, it is essential to create a sense of security and stability in the environment that increase continuity. These include events belonging to the daily, weekly and annual structure, but the predictability of adult interaction also increases these factors. Genuine presence and enabling experiences of success are essential.
The above-mentioned environment is naturally also ideal for children who already have high resilience and have grown up in a safe environment. Especially when dealing with children with insecure attachments, special efforts should be made to reduce the child’s sense of shame. This is helped by the ability to see behind the child’s so-called symptoms, behavioral problems. Very often, the behavior of all people is logical in relation to what was previously experienced. There is no need to doubt the motives of the child. The child is still incomplete, and for an insecurely attached child, survival alone can be a strong motive combined with lack of skills.
Based on this, a few simple guidelines can be derived to break the negative cycle and start developing resilience in a positive direction. See the child’s behavior as communication. Face the child at a developmental level. Use clear language and simple expressions. Adapt the goals of the activity to the level of development of the child. This means enough challenge and opportunities to succeed. Differentiate tasks that require social and emotional skills according to the child’s level of development
Personally, I still think it is very important to accept the individual even when the behavior is unacceptable. In this case, you can take advantage of natural consequences, where it is important to give the opportunity to correct the failure and move forward. In its simplest form, this means that since you made a mess, you need to clean up, according to your level of development.
Rami Raivio
Entrepreneur, Consultant, Educator.
