In the wake of the Japanese earthquake and tsunami, parents, teachers, journalists and bloggers all over the world are discussing best practices for talking to children about disasters. Among my friends and colleagues, there is palpable angst about the effects of social media exposure on their children, who see and hear daily accounts of the war in Libya, destruction in Japan, and the threat of large-scale radiation exposure for thousands of citizens across the Pacific. As one friend posted on Facebook, "The world is on fire and I don't know what to tell my son."
Seemingly absent from the global conversation is a more interesting question: "What makes children resilient?" So many discussion threads I am reading these days suggest shielding young children from knowledge of wars and disasters -- anything that could scare them or threaten their feelings of safety in the world. I can't help but question this uniquely American choice to overprotect children, often treating them like delicate hot-house flowers with fragile egos and a bottomless need for support, lest they wilt under the stress of everyday life.
Resilient kids usually become resilient adults, able to roll with the punches of being human in an imperfect and unfair world. The quality of resilience -- long studied yet not well understood -- is nonetheless recognized as critical not only to the individual's adaptation to life's challenges, but to society's collective survival. It is those individuals who can persevere through their own adversity, be strengthened by it, and actually catalyze others to do the same. In the best of cases, these children grow up to become those agents of change who give back to the world more than they take, making it a better place for all of us.
While a child's natural temperament and genetic makeup are factors in his or her ability to successfully face challenging circumstances while learning and growing from them, there are many things adults can do to help children develop strategies for offsetting anxiety, managing stress and learning to overcome fear and trauma.
Here are 10 things that loving parents and other adult role models can do to foster resilient children who become resilient adults:
- Let children experience adversity, real or contrived. A child who is caringly supported through, but not shielded from, news of natural disasters or war, deaths or illnesses of loved ones, parental divorce or job loss, and so on become stronger children (and adults) who are more empathetic to others facing similar stressors. Children who have the good fortune of escaping trauma during their childhoods need #2 below even more than those for whom life has provided sufficient challenges in the formative years.
Resilience is a somewhat elusive quality, but children in firm possession of it can weather not only hearing long-distance stories about the tsunami in Japan, but also actually being there and emotionally surviving it. We can continue discussing the degrees to which we should shelter our American children from seeing and hearing accounts of the tragedy, or we can refocus on what is really important -- helping our children understand that sometimes bad things happen to good people, and that life does go on. The message is one of the indomitability of the human spirit, even in the face of disaster, and that is noble indeed.