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Day: May 25, 2020

Resilience…what is it?

Resilience is simply our ability to bounce back when something doesn’t go as planned.  You will recognise a resilient child by how they respond to challenging life situations, or by how they respond to a poor mark on an assignment, or losing a soccer game (or any game), or how they react when they have friend conflicts. Resilient children are able to recognise that sometimes hard things happen, but not let those hard things drag them down so far that they can’t really find their way back up very easily.  Children who aren’t resilient, may get depressed, unmotivated and often end up trash-talking themselves and others.

When I’m talking about resiliency to a student, I like to use the example of a rubber ball vs. a ball of playdough (or sticky-tac…whatever I have handy). When I press into a ball of playdough, it leaves an indent.  It changes the shape and it’s not as smooth as before.  When I press into a rubber ball, the shape isn’t changed – the indent bounces back out. The rubber ball is resilient – the play dough is not. My goal is to help kids discover how they can be more resilient..to help them find ways to be able to bounce back from a difficult situation, be more confident and secure in who they are. If you are a parent or a child on this blog, this chart may help you to start thinking and talking about resilience.

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