The Resilience Factor
Seven Essential Coping Skills
We’ve seen that our children’s advancing maturity is an extraordinary, challenging, occasionally exhausting, and often exhilarating roller-coaster ride both for them and for us. It is by confronting and mastering the different stages of development, with appropriate help and support from us, that children come to identify their strengths and weaknesses, their interests and talents, their beliefs and values. This is how they come to know and distinguish what is “genuinely me” from what is not.
But because we are parents, we can find it difficult to hold back, to not fill in the blanks, to bear quiet witness to our children’s struggles. Here’s the dilemma, though. By interfering and “protecting” unnecessarily, by being unable to tolerate their mistakes and failures, we rob them of the capacity to develop and fortify the coping skills necessary for navigating their developmental tasks well and for understanding their inner selves. College admissions counselors call applicants like this “failure deprived,” and know that they are unlikely to thrive under challenging circumstances. How would you ever know if you were capable or not if you didn’t have the opportunity to try, fail, and pick yourself up again? How else would you figure out how to regain your equilibrium after a challenge if you weren’t left alone to sort through different options? It’s easy to see how a child’s sense of self can wither under the well-intentioned but overprotective, even intrusive style of parenting that has become the norm today. Of course, we pay attention, advise when necessary, mitigate risk when we must, and never emotionally abandon our children. But we must allow them enough internal space, enough meaningful life experience to be able to develop the protective coping skills that are known to lead to the well-being and resilience that are the hallmarks of authentic success.
Most of us have learned to navigate through the complex and unpredictable challenges of life reasonably well. The more nimble we are in responding to both victories and setbacks, the more likely we are to feel that life is not simply manageable, but satisfying and meaningful. Given the range of challenges we face on a daily basis, we are most likely to feel successful when we can try and discard, in rapid succession, different coping skills until we find the one that is most suitable for the task at hand.
You’re home alone with your two children and they’re being really picky about the hastily prepared dinner you barely managed to throw together after spending an interminable day being criticized by your cranky supervisor. You can be irritable, insist your children eat, banish them to their rooms, threaten to never cook another meal, discuss options calmly, suggest they’re old enough to put together an alternative, or decide you could all use a slice of your favorite pizza from the Italian restaurant down the street. There is no single “right” solution to common problems like this but you should generally know what works best. The pizza out could be a good solution from time to time, but not if your kids are making dinnertime balkiness a nightly ritual. One night telling them to eat their dinner works fine; another night you’re so depleted that the only reasonable thing to do is go to your own room and let them figure it out for themselves. Many times a day you call on your coping skills to solve problems like this. It’s hard to imagine running a household (or just your own life for that matter) without a generous helping of skills like resourcefulness or self-control.
These two chapters are about how we help our children develop their own set of coping skills. Sometimes we “transfer” our favored skills to our children simply by modeling them. But while our children learn from watching how we react to challenge and recover from crisis, they are not us. Genetics and temperament play a role in determining which coping skills come most easily to us. We naturally lean in to our strengths. An extroverted parent may reach for enthusiasm first, while an introverted child may opt for creativity. Both can be equally effective in solving problems. Enthusiasm, creativity, resourcefulness, and a good work ethic are looked at together in chapter 6 because they have a greater temperamental basis and are primarily the kinds of skills kids call on to help them think through problems and challenges. Self-control, self-esteem, and self-efficacy are grouped together in chapter 7 because they are skills we call upon when situations demand action out in the world (if you’re wondering why self-esteem is there, you’ll need to keep reading).
More coping skills means greater resilience. It is important that we understand that resilience is not something our children have or don’t have. As Ken Ginsburg, one of the country’s leading experts on resilience, points out, “Resilience is not a character trait.” The same child can show great resilience under one set of circumstances (“My math grades are pretty bad, I’ll have to study a lot harder”) and limited resilience under another (“My friends didn’t invite me to go shopping today; my social life is over, I’m a complete loser”). Resilience fluctuates. It depends on temperament, support, and circumstances. We bolster our children’s resilience by protecting them from overwhelming risk and providing the support and the circumstances (this must include allowing our kids to struggle with manageable and age-appropriate challenge) that encourage the development of coping skills.
We have been overly focused on the “problems” of our children, our teens in particular. There seems to be endless advice on how to tell them what not to do. Don’t do drugs. Don’t have sex. Don’t drink and drive. Don’t neglect your schoolwork. But I’d suggest that we serve our children best when we don’t just tell them what not to do, but help them figure out what to do. “Don’t do drugs” isn’t much help when you are wired to try out new and risky experiences. But by promoting self-control, modeling it ourselves, and noticing and applauding it in our children we increase the likelihood that they will be able to take care of themselves across the range of challenges and seductions that life will present.
I’ve chosen the seven coping skills I consider most important, but this list is by no means definitive. I can’t imagine getting through life without a sense of humor; you may find a spiritual or religious practice indispensable. Every child should have some ability to draw on the seven coping skills in these two chapters. Feel free to add to and customize the list accordingly. Each section ends with a “do” and “don’t” list intended to give parents practical advice on what advances and what inhibits the development of each coping skill.