The wiggler is still very small and is not able to express his emotions in any way other than smiling or crying (or at least, not any way that I recognize). When he’s upset I try to name the emotion and make him feel that it’s OK to express the emotion and OK to feel it. When he’s a bit older I hope to have fuller conversations about emotions, and I definitely feel that talking about everything is the way to go. I love the idea of discussing things that made you feel good etc. and writing it all down in a journal!
I’ve been pondering this topic. It’s focused mostly on the mental part of emotional resiliency, but I think there’s something to be said for the dumb animal physicality of being able to endure. It certainly starts with enduring physical unhappiness, but after a certain age, or level of experience, it transfers to emotions.
Pitch your children headfirst into a variety of Type II fun, and teach the to enjoy the victory that comes from completion and competition and companionship. Sportsball is the easy assumption, but there are so many ways to torture your children. Solitary if they are shy, social if they ain’t.
My father believed in digging holes. And then filling them in. And then digging more holes. I didn’t see Cool Hank Luke until I was 35 years old. Imagine my surprise to realize a movie had stole the idea of a minor god…
We’ve been doing this with my four year old for all of three days now and it’s going well but his answers are definitely focused on what happened within the last hour or two usually. I even talked with him about his whole day at bedtime before I got the notebook out but he still seemed focused on what had happened recently. No big deal, just an interesting observation. Also for the last question about other people’s feelings, two out of three days he’s answered “Elsa”. He’s very much in a Frozen phase right now, but I think he also gets something out of her feelings manifesting as a snow swirls.
I also let him draw in the notebook when I’m done and sometimes he tells me about his drawings so I’ll make little notes for later (this blob is the head, eyes, that’s an elephant trunk nose…) and date it. It’s actually been a fun thing to do right before bed, I’m considering getting a notebook for myself to pick up journalling again.
My 3yo gives imaginary or wishful answers, sometimes (his sister did something at school so he’ll say he did it too, or “I only happy” when I know Little Mr. Tantrums was frustrated over something earlier!)
5yo sometimes references things that happened in previous days. They both don’t reliably reference big events that occurred (birthday party, grandparent visit, special occasion), which I find a little odd.
I’m going to continue with the practice and see how it evolves as they get older.
Agreed. I feel like there has been a lot of discussion on cultivating emotional intelligence (“EQ”), which is tremendously important and may have been @katscratch 's intent as OP. But when I read “resilience,” to me that says “getting through something difficult.” EQ certainly helps with that, but so does practice. For me, I think that was outdoorsy activities w/ fam and roadtrips. When you’re 3, 10, 100 miles from anywhere and you’re bored, tired, mad, etc there’s not really a choice but you do your best and deal. It can also be an activity that doesn’t come easy but is ultimately rewarding–school, sport, music, martial art, etc. Pretty sure my struggles with guitar kept me from dropping out of grad school, later.
Back on more of an EQ side, I think it’s important to work with a kid through putting themselves in another’s shoes, both from a place of “did you hurt your friend’s feelings?” and a place of “maybe your friend’s negative feelings have nothing to do with you.”
This is definitely a good point, and something that was kind of absent from my childhood so it feels more alien than the EQ portion of it. The EQ part feels more like passing on some of society’s programming of me as a Female Type to be nice and not take up too much space in a room by preemptively reading the room to be sure I don’t step on any toes.
I’m also not sure how to implement the “dig holes, fill in holes” thing, even if my kid were older? Like, what are the consequences if he says “Fuck this, this is bullshit” and refuses to dig? Or keep practicing guitar or whatever?
Good points. I think for me as a parent of my particular kid it was very easy to address the physical side, but it’s no less significant.
As a family we didn’t particularly encourage sports; the offerings we found for younger kids didn’t really focus on the qualities we wanted to cultivate in our son. He ended up fencing starting at age 8 and the biggest lesson was how to lose. Over and over and over. It was great.
We also included him in whatever activity we were doing as soon as he was physically able to participate. That meant cleaning once he could hold stuff and stand, hiking (at his incredibly slow pace, more a lesson for us in patience, ha), camping, cooking, whatever. It all adds up. I guess I didn’t even think of those as fostering resilience, but yeah, that ability to persevere is important to a person’s overall balance.
Not a parent, but a former kid I think there’s sometimes a fine line between teaching delayed gratification and forcing a person to contribute in a pointless activity, or one they really don’t care about anymore. For activities, I theoretically like the “persist to milestone” approach. Like, you aren’t allowed to quit just because now sucks. You can quit at the end of the season, after the recital, etc. Obviously, special circumstances excepted (bullying, injury, etc).
A very important lesson! If I could add something to my own “practice” with struggle/frustration, it would be more guidance for how to deal with those feelings and normalizing them. “Try, try again” is good, but so is “go for a walk and think about it,” “explain the problem to someone,” “sleep on it,” “try again after mealtime,” and “ask for help.” (FTR: This is more about the strategies I had to teach myself than how to walk a kid through frustration.)
The physical side is a good point. My loose guidelines for my children, based on my own childhood, were to be learning 1 instrument and 1 sport per term. What I learnt from my parents strategy with this was:
persistence with an activity to a milestone (end of term) as @galliver suggested
teamwork (play in band with other kids, group sports)
I’m not a parent so I feel unqualified to give any direct advice, but I think managing expectations has a lot to do with longterm emotional resilience. No idea how to instill that, lol, but I think it’s a really vital factor that’s often overlooked.
ETA: and I second the ideas about physical resilience translating to emotional resilience…obviously, lol.
I feel the need to point out, following this comment, that you HAD parents, yes? (I wouldn’t be so direct except you’ve actually mentioned them). As with most people, being the child in this situation is also “experience in parenting” and useful for a current parent to know what worked for a person who’s now an adult!
@LadyDuck That’s true! My home life was pretty rough, but my parents did do a couple of things I’ve found very useful:
They taught me how to problem solve and research solutions when faced with an obstacle. They also always told me to look at myself (sometimes too much, lol) like, there was zero sympathy for anything, it was always what I could do to make it better/what I did to make it bad. They went wayyyy too far on this one, lol, but it does serve me well now!
We volunteered, a lot. I think growing up working in soup kitchens and hospices had a massive impact on me. My parents also grew up in poverty and always reminded us of how most of the world lives/how they lived.
My parents made me read a lot of autobiographies of extraordinary people in insane circumstances. It helped me understand how big the world was and how much people overcome in life. I’m grateful I read all that at a young age.
I was expected to be able to handle things with grace. I think by far one of the best things my parents did was not go easy on me because of my disability. I had chores, rules, grade expectations, all that stuff, just like other kids. I have met some people with disabilities who were ultra coddled/spoiled and their lives are totally out of control/unmanageable. It’s a huge disservice to make someone think they can’t handle things or that life is so so so impossibly hard, they will internalize it. I feel like whenever I had problems my parents kind of operated off the assumption that of course I could figure it out and solve it. Again, they went too far on this, lol, but I really do feel very confident in general. I never leaned on them much for anything and did things for myself at a very young age.
I should clarify it wasn’t like my kid had no experience with failure until he was in a sport; that’s just an easy example. All this stuff is an ongoing conversation, all the time, and overlaps constantly. From the first time he fell down, bleeding, and looked for my reaction to last week when he called for advice about dealing with a prospective employer that might be blowing him off. Dealing with shit within ourselves doesn’t happen in compartmentalized categories. I totally agree that all the aspects of health and growth need to be nurtured, but for me at least as both a kid and a parent it was all the same process, with some areas that came more naturally and some that needed guidance.
It’s not like I wanted to dig the holes. I did it because my father was quite a bit bigger than me, and I was afraid of the consequences of not digging. The previous version of the holes was my father’s belt. At age 12 I wrote and delivered a treaties on why corporeal punishment was ineffective and cruel. So he came up with the holes. I dug because I did not want to revert to smurfbutt, and because I feared his wrath.
My da loves me fiercely, and he did not abuse any of his children. So in the inevitable squealing about how you (the global you; not the specific Meerkat alone you) will never hit your children, let’s not go there.
So was the holes because you had energy to burn, or was it “you did this thing, go dig holes as a consequence/ punishment”? Originally I assumed it was just a general character building exercise like the 500+ trees my mum made me plant on grandad’s farm.
Ah, so to translate this into Modern Parenting Wisdom ™, the parent offered two choices to the child and the parent was okay with either choice being selected. If you had said “I don’t want to do option A (digging holes)” then that would have meant you selected option B (belt) by default, so you chose to do A because you did not want to do B.
Reviving this thread because I came across a podcast that addresses a lot of the same issues, “How To: Stress Your Kids The Right Way” (~27 minutes). Podcast link and transcript of podcast
I think there’s sometimes a fine line between teaching delayed gratification and forcing a person to contribute in a pointless activity, or one they really don’t care about anymore. For activities, I theoretically like the “persist to milestone” approach. Like, you aren’t allowed to quit just because now sucks. You can quit at the end of the season, after the recital, etc. Obviously, special circumstances excepted (bullying, injury, etc).