Helping young people build resilience is more important than ever

With today being National Child and Youth Mental Health Day, I thought it was important to share an article I was recently interviewed for. The article is about resiliency and young people, and features clinical psychologist Dr. Diana Brecher, who has developed a 5 Factor Model of Resilience to help youth build essential skills.

These are new skills for many young people, and they’re more important than ever. While the pandemic has challenged the resiliency of most of us, young adults have been especially tested. They haven’t lived through cycles of set-backs and rebounds to understand that recovery will come. I’ve seen it with my own children, who don’t feel like they have a lot of choice in how they live their lives, feel pressure and stress, and don’t have a relevant toolkit of how to manage through it.

If you have young people in your life whose mental health and emotional well-being have been impacted by the pandemic—or are one yourself—I encourage you to read the article and take the Resiliency Quiz that you’ll find at the end of it.

There is hope on the horizon. We’re already seeing signs of how society will open up and bounce back. Until then, let’s make sure we give our young people the tools, and understanding, to manage through this period so that they don’t just bounce back, but also bounce forward.