The Ordinary Magic of Raising Resilient Kids

Resilience is the more likely response

We often talk about resilience as a superpower that is a fixed, innate quality that some children are simply wired with, allowing them to bounce back from everything. There is a fantasy of the resilient person who is unflappable, of a secret ingredient that makes your child tough or gives them an edge. And if your child struggles, it’s easy to internalize that message and feel like you or they are failing. But this week, I sat down with the mother of resilience research from the Institute of Child Development in the College of Education and Human Development at the University of Minnesota, Dr. Ann Masten, who also authored Ordinary Magic, to hear directly from her about what resilience really is. Her message, about the dependence we have on systems to make us resilient, and the very real and ordinary ways we can support resilience at home, is both reassuring and hopeful for all parents.

Photo by Brandon Green on Unsplash

 I define resilience as the capacity of a system to adapt successfully to challenges that have the potential to harm or destroy that system. - Dr. Ann Masten

Think of a child not just as an individual, but as a living system connected to many other systems: their family, their friends, the school system, the healthcare system, and even the global climate. This multi-system reality means that we are each only as resilient as the systems we depend on. Although resilience research has traditionally focused on children who did well despite adversity, understanding how they avoid, overcome, and recover from problems is not enough. We also need to understand the power of adaptation.

When we credit resilience purely to an individual’s inner skills or wiring, we create a damaging myth. Dr. Masten reminds us that humans are an incredibly adaptive species, evolved through both biological and cultural evolution to learn and survive. She equates this to our immune system, adjusting to the environment in order to thrive. If your immune system is never challenged, it won’t function as well. Similarly, kids need experience with challenges to tune their coping systems to the environment. The goal is to keep the challenges manageable and to provide support.

 Just like our immune system tunes itself to the environment it is exposed to, kids similarly need experience with challenges to grow their own capacity. - Dr. Ann Masten

The most powerful protective factors that research has shown to allow a child, parent, or family to overcome adversity are “perfectly ordinary resources, relationships and opportunities.” It doesn’t require anything exotic or exceptional to make it through. Most successful adapters simply rely on basic human capacities like thinking ahead, controlling emotions, connecting with other people, and utilizing support. The magic comes from the combination of supports around a child. At the top of the list for kids is relationships with caring adults, including their family and a strong sense of belonging. In an environment where kids are connected, have good caregiving, and opportunities to learn, they naturally develop the skills we know they need to face the future, like good problem-solving, confidence, and a positive sense of self.

One of the most common anxieties I hear from parents centers on stress. We worry about inflicting toxic stress on our children, and the term has become so broad that it often confuses regular, manageable life struggles with truly traumatic experiences. Dr. Masten helps to clarify the distinction between traumatic situations that we need to prevent and protect children from - like war, maltreatment, prolonged separation, or homelessness. In these cases we need to lower the risk of exposure to trauma, and we worry about the long-term impact of stress on growth and development. But ordinary challenges or positive stress are something very different. These are the necessary, everyday challenges that all children will encounter and that they need to navigate in order to hone their skills. Stress, in this context, is actually good for them, and creates an opportunity for them to flex and adapt.

The important role of parents around adaptation is to practice scaffolding. Figuring out how much our child can handle and providing just enough support to help them solve the problem without taking it over. This process of working through small adversities is how our children gain confidence to navigate bigger challenges.

Key takeaways for parents:

1. “Good enough is good enough, really.” Development and adaptation are largely on your side. Humans adaptive systems naturally bend toward the positive. Don’t sweat every moment or worry over every missed opportunity. This is a long game, and perfection is NOT our useful or attainable.

2. Parents have limited influence, but they do have some. There are so many other systems in a child’s life - friends, school, community - that contribute to their development. It is not all on you, and you can’t control it all.

3. Parents need support. Society doesn’t provide enough for parents, and isolation is a major challenge. As the country’s previous surgeon general noted in his report on parental mental health, parents are suffering without the care they need to do the job demanded of them. Finding our own villages, communities, car pools and outlets is essential to filling our own tanks (or putting our oxygen masks on first). Our children need us to do this, even if we don’t think we do.

4. Positive routines, clear limits and cultural traditions matter. Having predictable structure creates an environment where kids can flourish, where they can free up time and energy in taking on new challenges, and where they can feel the safety and security of being loved. This mattering is essential for mental health and wellbeing.

5. We all need challenges. Finding opportunities for our children to succeed AND fail is essential to their development. Once upon a time this may have been easy, but recent parenting trends may mean you are running more and more interference between your children and the challenges they face. Instead, focus on finding manageable challenges and scaffolding your child in facing them.

It’s in the ordinary day-to-day work of connecting, supporting, and scaffolding, and the cumulative effect of a thousand ordinary moments, that a human’s extraordinary capacity for adaptation is built. May we take this work into something hopeful ahead. Into believing in ourselves, in our children, and into the future they will make.