May 14, 2024

5 Tips To Build Resilience in Children

Navigating the journey of growth can be both enchanting and daunting for our children. From tentative first steps to embracing new emotions, every milestone is a testament to resilience and growth.

Many of our staff in My Little Campus are parents too. Believe us when we say we understand the worry that probably makes you feel. As parents, most of us would give nearly anything to keep hardship from our little ones!

Alas, that’s impossible. However, it’s perfectly possible to prepare our little ones to face problems. 

Indeed, as early as preschool, one can hone a child’s ability to deal with and even thrive in the face of adversity. This means building resilience in children, endowing them early on with a trait that will serve them well for the rest of their lives. 

How can one do this, you ask? Today, we’ll go over the techniques our educators at My Little Campus practise.

1. Raise them to have a growth mindset

The growth mindset is an attitude that’s always focused on improvement. It believes talents and abilities aren’t determined at birth. Rather, they’re honed and even acquired.

In our childcare in Singapore, it’s long been one of the pillars of our child development approach. This is because it often leads to more resilient children who view even hurdles as opportunities for development.

We’ve already seen this in the studies of Dr Carol Dweck, where she investigated the differences between children who rebound after setbacks and those who don’t. Ultimately, her research suggested that praising persistence and effort (growth mindset) led to better results than praising intelligence (fixed mindset). 

You can apply similar principles with your preschooler. Praise his/her perseverance because that tells him/her it has value and can lead to eventual triumph. If you praise his/her intelligence instead, it seems like he/she has already plateaued and doesn’t need to try to “get smarter”.

2. Encourage them to adopt positive coping mechanisms

One of the best ways of building resilience in children is to show them that how they react to a setback matters in how they feel. 

If they dwell on it and beat themselves up, they only feel worse. But if they approach it as a lesson on what doesn’t work instead and as a fresh opportunity to learn, they can feel better faster.

This means teaching children to accept failure. Help them see it as a temporary stop, not the end of the road. Show them that it can even be a chance to grow!

You can also teach children to accept uncertainty and change this way. Take the first day of preschool, for instance: many children end up anxious or even crying about this big change to their routines. 

But as we said before in our guide to preparing for it, this doesn’t need to be the case. You can even get them excited about it by framing the change as a chance for new adventures and excitement!

3. Provide a supportive environment

Parental and peer support has been shown critical in reducing stress symptoms among children and adolescents facing problems. That’s why we spend so much time creating supportive, engaging environments for all of the children in our care at My Little Campus.

To do the same, try to create an empathetic, nonjudgemental space for your child. Make it clear from the get-go that he/she can always share things with you – even when it’s something that you might disapprove of.

If your child knows that you’re always ready to acknowledge his/her emotions, you create a “fallback” position in his/her mind. This and you will give him/her the sense that even in the bleakest of times, there’s always a sanctuary to turn to when he/she needs respite.

4. Help them put things in perspective

A lot of children tend to find the long-term too abstract to consider, so the disasters of the present feel like forever to them.

You can help by encouraging your child to think about what’s beyond “the now”. Remind him/her about past problems or pains that didn’t last forever or that he/she overcame. 

Talk about how your child might have been worried about meeting new people at preschool, for instance, but now has friends whom he/she met there. Or about how he/she used to find writing his/her own name difficult but can do it handily now. 

Remind children of their accomplishments at times of trouble. This can help them find the strength to keep going, in search of better moments.

5. Sustain a positive view of themselves

Something that can severely hamper a child’s ability to recover from a setback is a negative opinion of the self. That’s why it’s important to ensure that your child maintains his/her self-confidence and opinion of himself/herself in adversity.

There are several ways to do this, including reminding your child that no one is defined by his/her failures. Remind your child too that he/she has overcome challenges before, and has abilities and accomplishments worth celebrating.

The idea is to affirm your child’s self-worth and positive self-image. You want to prevent your child from feeling like whatever he/she is facing is overwhelming by reminding him/her that he/she has the power and ability to forge on!

Let us help you build your child’s resilience

While it may be tempting to put off some of the steps we outlined for a later age, it’s actually best to start as soon as possible. That’s because resilience is something that children build on over the years. 

What’s more, what works for one child doesn’t always work for another. Even at My Little Campus, we’ve found it necessary to tailor our approaches according to each child’s personality and preferences – so you too may have to be flexible in how you approach this.

If you want more help with building your child’s resilience, reach out to us. You can enrol your child in our preschool programmes, where our approach to holistic development strengthens children’s resilience. 

To learn more about how we do it, contact us today. You can even enquire about which My Little Campus programmes would best serve your child!