Building Resilience in Children: A Guide for Parents

Building resilience in children is a crucial aspect of their development and helps them navigate life's challenges. Resilience is the ability to bounce back from adversity, adapt to difficult situations, and continue to grow and develop despite certain challenges. Types of challenges could be anything from solving maths problems, making new friends, moving to a new house, changes in school, or other personal circumstances. A resilient child can adjust better with different events throughout their lives and are better able to manage and regulate their own emotions.

As a parent, there are many ways to help your child develop resilience and navigate different challenges. Here are some strategies you can implement that will help build resilience in your child.

Strategies for Building Resilience

Encourage Independence

Encouraging independence in children is a key factor in building their resilience. Allow children to make choices and age-appropriate decisions on their own, without offering to help. This helps them learn decision-making skills and understand the consequences of their choices. For example, let a toddler choose between two outfits to wear or a kinder child decide what activity they would like to do on the weekend. These choices will help promote adaptability in different situations.

As well as encouraging independent thinking, also support children in trying new things and stepping out of their comfort zones. This can be as simple as trying a new food, participating in a new activity, or making new friends. Emphasise the learning experience rather than the outcome, to encourage exploration and independence.

Promote a Growth Mindset

A growth mindset refers to the belief that abilities and intelligence can be developed through effort, learning, and persistence. Teaching children this is crucial for fostering a growth mindset and building resilience. Some effective strategies include:

• Promoting positive reinforcement – praise and recognise a child’s efforts and strategies they used to achieve something rather than their innate abilities. E.g. “You worked very hard on that puzzle.”
• Encouraging a love of learning – encourage children to explore their interests and continually ask questions. Provide them with resources that will spark their learning such as books, educational games and activities.
• Setting realistic goals – help children set achievable goals by breaking larger tasks into smaller steps. Celebrate their progress towards these goals to show that effort leads to improvement.
• Teaching persistent - encourage children to persist through challenges. Remind them that struggling with a task is a normal part of the learning process and that they can overcome challenges with effort and practice.

Teach Emotional Regulation

It’s important to help children understand and articulate their emotions. Labelling emotions can help explain them and make them less overwhelming. As a parent, you can help children recognise and express their emotions through different techniques. One technique is by practicing mindfulness and relaxation techniques, such as deep breathing, listening to calming sounds, meditation, or yoga. This will help children manage stress and express their emotions in a positive way.

To help children identify and label their emotions, you can start by naming the emotion they are feeling, e.g. “It looks like you’re feeling sad” and acknowledge that it’s okay to feel this way. Another technique could be to create charts or emotion wheels that depict different emotions. Children can point to how they are feeling, which can help them identify and communicate their emotions more effectively.

Build Social Connections

Building friendships and social connections is important for children to develop resilience.  Social connections provide emotional support, opportunities for learning social skills, and a sense of belonging for children. As a parent, you can help your child build on their social connections by encouraging family bonds.  Spend quality time as a family and enjoy regular outings and activities together. Arrange playdates with other children and encourage participation in sporting activities, so they have the opportunity to interact with others.

Attending an early education setting like Aspire, will also help build children’s communication skills with their peers and educators. It’s a great way for children to make new friends in their classroom and participate in different activities offered in our curriculum. We support social development in numerous ways, and understand the importance it plays in fostering new friendships and connections.

Foster Optimism

Lastly, its important to nurture a positive outlook and teach children to see challenges and setbacks as opportunities for growth. Demonstrate optimism in your own behavior and reactions, so you can model this positive behaviour to your child. For example, use positive language such as “I will try my best and learn from it’’, rather than “I can’t do this”, to encourage positive thinking.  

Furthermore, talk about positive experiences and outcomes in your day, to highlight the good things that happened. This provides children with a sense of optimism and positivity that they are likely to model themselves.

The Role of Play and Creativity

The role of play and engaging in creative activities contributes greatly to building resilience in children. These activities offer a safe and natural outlet for children to express their feelings. Through art, drama, or imaginative play, children can process and articulate emotions they might not yet be able to verbalise. Group play and creative projects also require children to work together, share and take turns, fostering social skills and teamwork among peers. Play also encourages children to try new activities and take risks in a safe environment. This builds their confidence and willingness to face new challenges, which also helps teach resilience.

At Aspire Early Education, we recognise the role of creativity in early childhood education, and provide intentional learning opportunities throughout our curriculum that promote play and creativity. We also offer incursion programs such as SketchRoo and Hey Dee that allow children to draw, be creative and express themselves.

Promoting Resilience in Early Learning

Promoting resilience in early learning is crucial for helping young children develop the emotional and social skills they need to handle challenges effectively. At Aspire, we aim to foster resilience through our learning environments, activities and daily routines. Here are our key approaches:

Providing a Safe and Predictable Environment

It’s important to establish daily routines for meals, naps, and playtime to give children a sense of stability throughout their day. At Aspire, we incorporate scheduled mealtimes for each age group around play and learning time, as well as daily naps for the nursery children. Having daily routines provides a stable and predictable environment for children.

Encouraging Exploration and Play

Allowing ample time for exploration and unstructured play, fosters creativity and problem-solving skills. It helps build children’s confidence and independence when they can do things on their own. At Aspire, we offer many opportunities for unstructured play such as playing on the playground, exploring the sandpit, building construction blocks or drawing on paper. Unstructured play builds important qualities such as imagination, creativity, and empathy.

Teaching Emotional Regulation

As discussed above, teaching emotional regulation is important in building resilience. This can be achieved by helping children identify and label their feelings e.g., "I see you're feeling sad because your toy broke". At Aspire, we implement different activities that teach children how to understand their emotions. Some examples include using craft materials to create different faces of emotion, and identifying and tracing different facial expressions.

Supporting Communication Skills

Building on communication skills and language development can also help build resilience. Engaging in regular conversations, reading together, and singing songs can all help build language development. Encouraging drawing, painting, and other forms of creative expression will also help children communicate their feelings. We run different incursion programs at Aspire that help build on these skills such as Sketchroo, Hey Dee Ho, Magic Jenny and more.

These are just a few ways that our Aspire curriculum encourages resilience in children.

Practical Activities and Exercises for Kids

As well as knowing the strategies to implement, here are some activities and exercises that parents and educators can implement to help build resilience in children. These include:

• Role Playing Activities- Acting out and role-playing different social scenarios (e.g., making a new friend, or being a teacher for the day) helps build social skills and empathy. At Aspire, the kinder children participate in different role-playing scenarios such as being a supermarket operator and scanning plastic foods or playing the role of a teacher with other peers as students. These activities help practice real-life scenarios and build on their communication skills.

• Creativity Projects - Encourage children to draw, paint, or create different crafts to express their feelings and thoughts. Throughout the day, the children at Aspire engage in various creativity projects such as drawing a sunset on paper, making pizzas out of coloured paper, or creating an object out of playdough. All these different experiences spark fun conversions and inspire the children to get creative.

• Mindful Breathing - Teach children simple breathing exercises to help them calm their minds and manage stress. Yoga and meditation are also great mindfulness exercise to implement as well. At some of our Aspire centres we run a Yoga Incursion program which increases children’s ability to focus and concentrate and teaches them how to use breathing exercises to help regulate their emotions.

• Puzzle Challenges - Giving children age-appropriate puzzles to solve is another great activity to teach resilience. Solving puzzles encourages persistence and problem-solving skills that require children to think creatively.

• Cooking Together - Involve children in cooking simple meals or snacks. Cooking has many benefits for children’s development and teaches them independence and practical life skills. At Aspire, we offer cooking programs and experiences for our different age groups throughout the term. Here they learn to cook recipes with our Centre chefs, such as banana muffins, coconut balls and yummy sandwiches.

Engaging kids in practical resilience-building activities can help them develop essential skills to cope with different challenges.

Building resilience in children is a continuous process that involves nurturing their physical, emotional, and social development. By providing a supportive environment and teaching essential life skills, we can help children develop the resilience needed to thrive in the face of any challenge they may face.

If you liked this resource, we also have a range of other resources that provide practical tips and strategies for parents. Check out some of them below:

• Tips for Encouraging Positive Behaviour in Your Child
• Tips to Encourage Healthy Eating Habits for you Child
• Guide to Navigating the Challenges of Parenting in the Digital Age

To learn more about Aspire Early Education & Kindergarten, enquire now at your nearest Aspire centre here.