Is Resilience All It's Cracked Up to Be?

Resilience.

What does it mean to you? And should we want it for our kids?

As the CEO of an organisation which has the word in our mission statement you'd think the answer was obvious, but I am a bit more nuanced.

The word that really sits uncomfortably with me in the above definition is toughness. When we think about young people, and I think about my daughter or my nieces and nephews, I don't want them to be 'tough.' So many mental health problems, particularly for men and boys, come from a desire to be 'tough'.

So what is is that I do like about the definition?

Elasticity. To recover from difficulties.

That's what is means to me, and it's what I want for myself, and for every young person in Scotland.

Life is hard. People can hurt us. Circumstances are challenging.

I do not want toxic positivity. When things are rubbish I want my daughter to acknowledge that, to sit with it and to feel it. Our urge as parents or aunties/uncles can be to take away all the pain, and to minimise hurt. I get it. I do it! But I try not to.

There's a story I try to remember in my parenting, I believe from Dr Becky Kennedy, about the feelings bench. Our kids are going to have lots of feelings. And all feelings are valid. We might not see the big deal about not getting into the choir, or losing a match, or we might also be feeling big feelings - a death in the family for example.

What we might want to do is to toughen our kid up; to shrink and minimise their reaction so that they can feel better (often so that we can feel better!) In the example with the figurative bench, we are saying to them, "that's not a real bench, you can't sit there, you don't want anyone to see you sit there." Or, "that's a stupid bench, it has no right to make you feel bad, never mind it." We can start pulling them off the bench before they are ready because it makes us feel bad.

We might also try to distract them. "Come off the bench, I'll get you ice cream."

But what we need to do is to sit on the bench beside them. Acknowledge the feelings and then just sit there. Don't try to come up with solutions or to make it go away. Sit, breathe. Let them know you are there.

Then, when they are ready they will get off the bench.

And they will realise that they survived it. And the next time there's a big feeling, they'll know they can handle that too, and that you trust them to handle it. Jumping in to rescue our kids does them no favours.

Resilience, for me, is best summed up by the title of Glennon Doyle's podcast, We Can Do Hard Things.

Before I came to Winning Scotland, I'd been working in mental health with the Scottish Government and felt like much of what we were doing was, quite necessarily, sticking plasters. I remember telling people that I wanted to go upstream. To help young people to feel more resilient, and to have the skills, tools and experience so that when they fell down they wouldn't go right back to square 1.

Maybe the first time, they would, but the next time they'd go back to square 2. Then square 3. Then eventually we get to a point where something bad happens, we sit with it, we feel it and then we decide what we want to do next, rather then buffeted by winds and emotions outside our control.

And I'll finish with my usual caveat that helping kids to feel be more resilient does not excuse us as adults from our responsibility to make the world a better place for them to be in.

It's an all too short hop from believing (as I do) that individuals have tremendous power to change their own lives, and the lives of those around them to thinking that anyone who hasn't done that just isn't trying hard enough.

No amount of personal resilience can compensate for being hungry or having shoes that are too small. Your own resilience has a much harder job to do if the adults around you make you feel like nothing you do will be good enough, or when you are excluded from opportunities for your skin colour, accent or postcode.

And there's a whole other article to write about resilient communities...

The current mental health crisis is not the fault of young people. We are experimenting on our kids - smartphone access and ultra processed food to name just two things, and at the same time there is increasing uncertainty about the future they are inheriting; climate crisis, future pandemics, lack of job security and inequality increasing exponentially.

I'm optimistic about the future. There are proven ways to increase resilience in our children and young people, but it will take all of us. It's not just about school, or parents, but all of us working together to role model these skills, and to give our children time to practise them.

We're chuffed to be working on Planet Youth in Scotland and that model talks about 4 'domains' - home, leisure, school and community - every single one of us fits into one of those domains for at least one child, so what can you do differently to help them thrive?