Start with small conversations: The importance of teachers in shaping children’s lives

“I failed. I don’t want to try again.” “Why should I do it, if it’s not going to work?”

As you can see from these quotes from children I’ve met with recently, many children have trouble in school when they’re asked to challenge themselves. They can struggle to feel all right with being wrong. They can end up giving up on opportunities too early, if they feel worried about not being successful.

?At this time of the year, it’s so important to see how teachers can shore up children’s resilience, starting with the smallest conversations. ?

To nurture resilience at all ages, we need a foundation of teaching kids to find 1) joy 2) optimism and 3) an understanding of self and others, including empathy.

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It’s important to realize that this goes both ways—that students and teachers are both in need of empathizing with one another and the hardships all have faced. How can we get there? Here are a few key ways:

1)??? Shift power structures to help teachers feel closer to kids: While teachers will remain in the role of mentor and guide, we need to rethink assumptions about teachers being distant from students. For example, we should stop assuming that teachers will never express feelings or be vulnerable.

2)??? More time and support for emotional discussions: To support children in welcoming all emotions, and processing them, teachers should be given more support to express and process their own emotions. There should be more time, space, and routines for teachers to lean more on each other and on counselors to discuss emotions. This discussion should be an everyday conversation, so that children and adults can feel welcomed. Mental health, in this way, can be a priority—and not only when children are feeling negative emotions, but also, when they are feeling neutral or even well.

3)??? Mental health shouldn’t equate only to mental health problems. Instead, moving forward, we should work to have both adults and children understand a model of what it means to have strong mental health. This doesn’t mean necessarily feeling happy all the time. Instead, it means being able to feel comfortable in the discomfort of harder emotions, and also comfortable to feel moment of peace, joy, creativity, and ease.

As part of this three-step model, our education system should prioritize critical thinking, generating and evaluating ideas, and creativity. Especially in an age of AI, it’s not an effective model to simply ask children to spit answers back. Rather, moving forward, it will be critical for children to be able to separate the wheat from the chaff, and to think out loud, creatively and at times philosophically, about questions like: How does this idea align or not align with my values? Which of these answers is “better,” and why? Which of the voices (as in a written assignment) feels most authentic to the character, and why?

In all this, we should prioritize helping children link thought and feelings, ideas and emotions. We invite children to use all their senses to imagine and explore. In this way, we support them, in everyday ways, to become resilient and value the present moment, not only future goals.