Richard Hogan: What is resilience and how can we boost it in our children?

It's vital that adults teach the next generation the power of emphasising positivity when something goes wrong

'True resilience is about how you learn to adapt and recover when life inevitably becomes a little tricky.' Picture: iStock

Resilience. It’s one of those words we see everywhere; is our economy resilient? Do we have a resilient friendship or marriage? How can I make my child a resilient person? Oh, these Gen Z kids have no resilience!

It is used to describe someone or something that can withstand the vicissitudes and turmoil of this chaotic modern world.

But true resilience is not about being immune to everything life throws at you, it’s not that you won’t feel stress from time to time; it’s about how you learn to adapt and recover when life inevitably becomes a little tricky.

I carried out a study in 2018 when I was writing my first book, Parenting The Screenager. I interviewed more than 500 primary and secondary school students, investigating their use of technology, resilience, and pornography.

The insights I received from that study is why I have been such an advocate for action to stop our children from consuming hardcore, sexual images.

Primary school students were viewing very problematic images. I still can’t believe nothing has changed, to stop that poison reaching the minds of our children.

The study also showed that children who exhibited resilience spoke to themselves more positively than the students that showed low levels of resilience.

For example, a student with high levels of resilience understood that challenges and negative experiences were only temporary. If they missed a penalty in football they would tell themselves, ‘I’ll get it next time’. 

If they had a fight with their mother, ‘we will make up later’. If they didn’t get the result they wanted in an exam, ‘that was a tough exam, I’ll do better next time’. If they don’t feel great emotionally, ‘I don’t feel good today, but I was fine yesterday so more than likely I’ll be grand tomorrow’.

They had the capacity to talk to themselves in a more positive way. So, a resilient child feels everything any other child feels, but it’s how they interpret those feelings that makes the difference.

In my experience, a child who lacks resilience will selectively abstract one negative experience or feeling and make it a gestalt, the whole, of their experience. 

Miss a penalty, ‘I’m crap at football’. If they have a fight with their mother, ‘no-one loves me’. If the exam doesn’t go their way, ‘I’m stupid’. If they feel emotionally upset, ‘I never feel good’. Their capacity to speak positively to themselves is significantly diminished.

So, we have to get in there early as parents and disrupt that negative voice. The brain leans more towards negativity than positivity because that helps us survive.

But we can help prime our children’s brains a little more positively, by how we talk about them, and how we help them to challenge their inner talk.

Something I say as a mantra in my house is the following: “We go for things in this house, in the belief we can get it, and in the knowledge we don’t always get everything we go for, and if we don’t get it, we go again.” 

My children have heard me say that a thousand times. I want them to have the message; you can’t get anything if you don’t go for it.

I think today’s children have a terrible fear of not getting something they want, and therefore they don’t go for it. They believe that if they don’t go for something they really want, like the school play or a try-out for the school football team, well, then, they cannot be disappointed when they don’t get selected.

It’s a paradoxical intervention for fear of failure, the paradox is that by avoiding, they create the outcome they so desperately fear.

I have always believed that the family should model what the real world is like, and parents should be disrupters and push their children when the stakes are low.

We want our children to be able to take healthy risks and believe that they will be able to manage whatever life throws at them.

There is a lot of talk in the media about how soft today’s young adults are and how unprepared they are for the world they are going into.

Normal ups and downs like romantic break-ups or friendships ending seem to have a greater impact on this generation than previous ones.

If this is the case, we can’t blame the young adults. They didn’t grow up in a vacuum, we created environments for them that didn’t challenge them or push them so that they developed the ability to adapt to difficult situations.

We removed obstacles for them, we resolved moments when they were stressful, and they didn’t learn how to manage those moments.

Whenever my children come to me with an issue, I ask them questions: What do you think you are doing that is helping in the situation? What are you doing that is not helping? And what do you think you could do to change how things are going?

Simple questions empower children so that they learn that they have agency over their feelings and behaviours.

We will all feel low from time to time, life will throw plenty at us, the kitchen sink at times, but how we talk to ourselves in those moments will make the difference between collapsing and moving through.