Colman Noctor: How to raise a resilient child who can cope with adversity and failure

A crisis of self-worth is the reason why so many children seem to be unable to cope with the tribulations of life 

Picture: iStock 

'Children have it too easy'; 'They need to experience disappointment and failure - it's part of life'; 'They have to learn that everything doesn't always go the way they want it to'.

These are just a sample of the phrases I hear regularly. Although there is some truth in each one, the answer to the 'lack of resilience' in children might not be quite as simple as these phrases claim.

A growing number of children struggle with anxiety, low mood and panic. The My World 2 Survey, carried out in Ireland in 2019, predicted that 25% of young people will require professional intervention for low mood and anxiety. Given that this worrying prediction was made pre-pandemic, it is reasonable to assume this worrying figure may be considerably higher now.

If we believe that children's lack of resilience is because they have been overly protected from disappointment and failure, then is the answer to exposing them to more of these types of experiences? 

Failure and disappointment are a lottery. It is not possible to devise a chart that identifies the right amount of failure to optimise the chances of building character and resilience in your child. We can all understand a person driven by the experience of failure in childhood and how it spurred them to try harder and bounce back better. However, I can provide umpteen examples of children who experienced failure or disappointment, which resulted in them opting out, giving up and struggling with a plethora of emotional hang-ups.

The Darwinian' survival of the fittest' approach is at odds with my belief about how we help children develop into responsible adults. I don't believe that failure produces robustness. Instead, the factors that predict a child's reaction to adversity are present long before the adversity strikes. These defining qualities are self-worth, self-value and self-belief.

The pace at which adversity is introduced into a child's life decides whether it builds character or destroys their soul. Introducing challenges gradually into a child's life will allow them to build resilience over time. But a parallel process that nurtures the child's self-belief, self-value and self-worth needs to be in place first. As the child's self-worth increases, they can better negotiate adversity. 

Building a relationship with yourself

Resilience is not determined by how hard your life has been, but by the quality of the relationship you have with yourself. Ideally, this relationship with yourself should contain the right amount of self-belief, an awareness of your limitations and the ability to prioritise what is important and what is not.

One of the biggest misunderstandings of contemporary parenting is the belief that self-worth is related to tangible success. This leads us to believe that the child who gets all the gold stars, the 10 out of 10 in their spelling tests, or thrives in sport has the greatest self-worth. This is a myth. These external variables only measure how confident a child is at performing a task and play no role in our sense of self-worth. 

We need to nurture our children's qualities such as kindness, loyalty, honesty and authenticity instead of their grades, medals and awards. 

Only when a child's self-worth is intact can the child be in a position to absorb adversity, disappointment or failure. If their self-worth is robust, they won't give up when they are not picked for the team, they won't fall apart when an exam doesn't go their way, and they won't quit when they encounter constructive criticism. Instead, they will be able to draw on their self-worth reserves and place the disappointment in perspective. They will naturally be upset, which is understandable, but they will bounce back.

Overinvolved in our children's lives 

Perhaps the reason why so many children seem to be unable to cope with the tribulations of life is not a resilience crisis, but a crisis of self-worth. This can be hard to understand when we consider that children nowadays seem like such a confident generation. But confidence is not the indicator on which we should be concentrating. This generation is not 'soft' or 'entitled' - they are growing up in an era of adult scrutiny and over-involvement in children's lives. 

Over the last decade, adult principles have been imposed on children's activities. This has led to the premature introduction of competition in children's sports and the announcement of children's spelling test results on social media or the family WhatsApp group.

It is adults who attend parent-teacher meetings with notepads or recording devices and demand results from teachers for their child. It is the adults that march up to the playschool teacher demanding an explanation as to why their two-year-old cannot count to 10 yet. And it is rarely the teenager who signs themselves up for grinds in almost every subject for the Leaving Cert.

These adult-led developments have meant that children's lives have never been more observed, scrutinised, coached, publicised or timetabled.

So, before we say 'children have it too easy'; 'they need to experience disappointment and failure, it's part of life', we need to be aware that societal expectations have changed dramatically for children. They are negotiating a far more complex world than we did. 

It is too easy to blame this on some invisible force like 'social media' or 'phones' and shrug our shoulders and say that there is nothing we can do about it. Instead, we need to hold up a mirror to ourselves as adults in their schools, sports clubs and families and recognise that we may be contributing to the pressure they are experiencing and, in some ways,  we might be setting them up for failure. 

As adults, we are tasked with responding to the needs of anxious children who are experiencing panic attacks, separation anxiety or low self-esteem. Maybe we need to spend more time trying to understand why this is happening rather than just reacting to the crisis. And we need to be aware of our role in fueling a culture that is not working for our children.

In the words of the late bishop Desmond Tutu "There comes a point where we need to stop just pulling people out of the river. We need to go upstream and find out why they're falling in". Perhaps the change starts with us. And instead of claiming children nowadays are too soft, we need to flip the narrative to say they are under too much pressure.