JO SEAGAR:

teaching kids resilience

I’m not a big fan of the modern parenting and educational trend of having no outright winner – surely only one person can win the Olympic gold or get the job.

I think we’ve gone award and certificate crazy, bestowing trophies on children for almost everything – even for just showing up and filling in the registration forms. Is it because we’re afraid children will be hurt by losing, so to compensate for this we make everyone a winner? I just don’t get it.

You can’t give happiness like a gift – it has to come from within. A parent’s job is to prepare their child for the storms ahead. You can’t steer their boat for ever and I think it’s wrong to lead children to expect it to always be smooth sailing ahead. Real life is not perfect. You don’t necessarily get picked for the team or the cast of the school play, you fail exams sometimes, the boyfriend dumps you and friendships fizzle out.

There will always be teachers you don’t see eye to eye with, rubbish jobs and nightmare bosses. In the end, those of us who can fend for ourselves and be resilient are better off.

The ability to rebound and rise again from the fall is an essential life skill you actually have to learn, to enable you to live a meaningful life.

I’m all for encouragement, but sometimes we need to step back, take a big breath and let our young ones struggle a bit. Maybe it’s learning to tie shoelaces, or facing the consequences of not unpacking muddy sports gear from their school bag – you explain it and help them by reminding them to do it, but then that’s it… Consequences need to be faced. We’ve got to stop spoon-feeding and continually rescuing our children, because that doesn’t help them learn to be independent and resilient.

If you constantly praise your children, especially when no effort has been put in, and you routinely tell them how great they are, they will develop an unrealistically high regard for their abilities and an ego that might make them insensitive to other people’s feelings, resulting in a warped sense of their own self-importance.

We should be teaching our children that celebrating someone else’s success will never take from their own. They need to be able to clap loudly when someone else wins the race. Instilling a sense of modesty and humility from a young age will help your child immensely in making friends and learning the value of teamwork. Whereas teaching children that they should be rewarded even if they haven’t excelled may be setting them up for many disappointments later in life.

We seem to give our children a mixed message of, on the one hand, be a winner, but also that no one is a winner, with everyone receiving an attendance certificate or the player of the day award. It’s very confusing and a difficult concept for children to grasp.

I think the answer is actually quite easy. The simple message being to try your personal best always. I know this argument is still a bit flawed, because you may have given it your absolute best shot but still not get the place on the team, the dream job or even the happilyever-after marriage. We learn through painful experience that often our best is just not good enough. But learning resilience helps you cope.

Another important life lesson is learning to lose gracefully. Children shouldn’t be protected from defeat. A child needs to experience loss and to learn from it, along with being taught the value of hard work and effort required to achieve success. Life isn’t always fair, but sometimes the hard stuff is the good stuff. We should also remind our children, and ourselves, that the expert in anything was once just a beginner. Having fallen and picked yourself up again makes you so much stronger than the one who never fell.

Teach them that tough times never last, but tough people do.

“A child needs to be taught the value of hard work and effort required to achieve success.”