Resilience is an essential life skill for overcoming and dealing with stress, challenges and adversity...in other words, real life. Here are 4 suggestions on how we can help today's youth be more resilient IRL (in real life).
My husband and I are the proud parents of two Generation Z young adults aged 20 and 22. They are at the beginning of their young adult lives, completing college and graduating from university.
You can read more about my journey of Raising Generation Z. In it, I share 3 lessons my sons taught me on how to raise tomorrow's leaders and how to be a better coach and mentor for today's young workforce.
Once our sons left home in Hong Kong to study half a globe away in Canada, we had to trust that we had done our best to prepare them for independent life as young adults. Our journey as parents has shifted from caregiver and provider to coach, advisor and (luckily) friend.
Our ability to protect them from the dangers in the world vanished.
Then the pandemic hit and we all were thrown into a new world of uncertainty, anxiety and adversity that none of us had experienced before. I nervously watched and hoped that my sons had the resilience to face these challenges on the other side of the globe as independent young adults.
As we continue to navigate our evolving pandemic new normal, there is a global generation of young adults who are finding their way through daily challenges IRL.
Now more than ever, resilience is an essential life skill for all of us. While those of us with more life experience have a reserve to help us with daily challenges, those who are beginning their independent lives can use some help.
This week, I want to deep dive into how we can help our youth build resilience and possibly strengthen our own skills in the process. Here are 4 suggestions on how we can help today's youth be more resilient IRL (in real life).
What is Resilience and Why is it Important?
Resilience is our ability to cope with life's difficulties and "bounce back" to a balanced functioning state. It's an important skill to have as it protects us from being overwhelmed and can help us to maintain our mental and emotional health.
There are 4 types of resilience that we can call on to help us in times of difficulty:
Psychological Resilience - "The ability to mentally cope with or adapt to uncertainty, challenges, and adversity. It is sometimes referred to as 'mental fortitude."
Emotional Resilience - "The ability to tap into realistic optimism, even when dealing with a crisis, and are proactive in using both internal and external resources to get through... to manage external stressors and their own emotions in a healthy, positive way."
Physical Resilience - "The body’s ability to adapt to challenges, maintain stamina and strength, and recover quickly and efficiently. It’s a person’s ability to function and recover when faced with illness, accidents, or other physical demands."
Community Resilience - "The ability of groups of people to respond to and recover from adverse situations, such as natural disasters, acts of violence, economic hardship, and other challenges to the group as a whole."
By Katie Hurley, LCSW for everydayhealth.com
Unless we live our entire lives in a protective bubble, we will encounter stressors, difficulties and adversities in real life at some point.
Unfortunately, many of today's young adults grew up with thick layers of protective bubble wrap as kids. Once on their own, they suddenly need to survive the hard knocks of life without cushioning. Challenges IRL can hurt.
The good news, resilience is a skill that can be learned.
Here are 4 suggestions on how can we help today's youth be more resilient IRL.
1. Teach How to Fall Safely
When our boys were little, they took Judo classes that I could barely watch. My husband assured me that it was safe for them to spar and flip each other onto the mats because they were taught how to fall. And he was right.
One of the first lessons taught in Judo is how to fall so that the children would not be scared and to avoid getting seriously injured. It still hurt to hit the mat. But because they knew how to fall, they were better able to focus on sparring techniques and not be afraid of falling.
This is a great metaphor for giving young adults coping skills as they will inevitably encounter "falls" or failures in life.
Instead of only preparing young adults to strive for success, we need to also prepare them for how they will handle failures and challenges. The focus is so often on just striving for success that they end up being afraid of failure.
So when they are young, help them to prepare for both success and failure. And that failure is a part of the journey to success. Teach them how to fall, safely.
2. Build a Balanced Self-awareness
Raising two boys who are close in age meant that there was always a risk of comparing and competing with each other. Having experienced this in our childhoods, it was something my husband and I did not want for my boys.
While their natural tendency to compete and compare with each other's achievements in academics and sports was inevitable. As parents, we avoided comparing them to each other. Instead, we talked about their strengths and weaknesses as parts of their individuality and how to appreciate each other's differences.
It's important to help young adults with a self-awareness that is balanced for both strengths and weaknesses.
Too often, we focus on celebrating only the strengths of children to build their self-esteem and confidence. Then as they mature into youth, the focus often switches to their weaknesses when they manifest in their teenage behaviour.
If we help them to have a balanced approach to identifying their strengths and weaknesses early in their development, perhaps we can avoid the labelling of strengths as "good" and weaknesses as "bad".
We all have strengths and weaknesses. Awareness of strengths can help to highlight opportunities. Awareness of weaknesses can help in anticipating challenges and how to cope.
3. Put Things in Perspective
When you are in a stressful situation or dealing with a challenge, everything is magnified and can feel like the end of the world. How many times have we felt this way and survived our self-induced catastrophes?
The first year of my younger son's young adult life as a college student was at the height of the second Covid-19 wave in Canada. After the first month of in-person classes, the city went into lockdown and the college announced that all classes would go online. As a Culinary Arts major, this was a setback.
My son was understandably frustrated, demotivated and ready to quit and pack his bags to come home. We had many long FaceTime conversations to help him step back and look at the bigger picture so that he could assess his options more objectively.
For young adults with more limited life experience, the moments of difficulties can feel insurmountable and impossible to resolve.
A part of learning resilience is to take a realistic perspective on the situation. In moments of stress, it's useful to see the situation in a bigger context in order to grasp its real severity, or the lack thereof.
Instead of magnifying and focusing on difficulties with a telescope, pull back to look at the bigger picture to see what possible next steps are on the overall map of life.
Provide children and youth with tools to regulate their emotions, thoughts, and behaviours in moments of stress so that they can pull back. For example, teach them self-regulation techniques for stress reduction such as breathing exercises, guided imagery and mindfulness training.
Sometimes, it can be as simple as taking a few deep breaths and a few steps back for a more realistic perspective.
4. Understand The Brick Walls Are There For A Reason
Setbacks or failures are inevitable "brick walls" we all face in life. Unfortunately, the societal norms of defining a person's worth by success make it even harder for us to accept and deal with adversity.
Resilience is a crucial ability that helps us to cope with mistakes, setbacks and failures so that we can grow, learn and achieve future successes.
In fact, studies have found that young scientists who experienced a significant setback early in their career actually went on to greater success than scientists who had seen early wins.
My own experiences with adversity in life happened in my early childhood and my youth. These experiences caused me great pain and learning. Working through them has made me the strong person I am today. (Find out more in my blog Finding Super Strength in Adversity.)
However, as a parent, I didn't want my children to experience devastating hardships in order to build resilience. Instead, my husband and I created a supportive and positive family culture with values that nurture and teach resilience.
Learn more about the 7 C's Model of Resilience in this informative article from parentandteen.com on Building Resilience in Teens.
“Hardships often prepare ordinary people for an extraordinary destiny.”
– C.S. Lewis
Help young adults to be able to scale the "brick walls" that they will face in life. Teach them to reflect on what challenges and adversities teach us. And how to turn the valuable lessons into strengths.
IRL
Covid-19 has augmented the reality for a global generation of youth. Pivotal milestones like high school or university graduation and establishing social networks entering post-secondary school life were altered. Going on 3 years in a global pandemic, a generation of youth has been tested in their ability to cope with uncertainty, instability, fear and anxiety.
In guiding my sons through these challenges, I have seen their resilience and am proud of how they continue to independently navigate through difficulties.
The next time you are helping a young adult in your life through a challenge, remember:
Teach How to Fall Safely
Build a Balanced Self-Awareness
Put Things in Perspective
Understand the Brick Walls Are There For a Reason
We all have the ability to build our resilience to cope with and overcome the unpredictability that is real life.
For additional helpful information on building resilience, here are some articles worth reading:
Resilience in Positive Psychology: Bouncing Back and Staying Strong - Online Article - positivepsychology.com
Top Tips to Help You Build and Cultivate Resilience - Online Article - everydayhealth.com
I would love to hear your comments!
What helps you to successfully cope with challenges and setbacks?
How have you built your resilience?
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