When I was a child in the ’90s, no one talked about resiliency. Still, the circumstances of my childhood demanded that I develop it. Through dealing with poverty to navigating my father’s mental health issues to caring for my three younger siblings while my mother worked, I was unintentionally being raised to know how to bounce back from crises.
As an adult, I’m incredibly thankful for this. Without bragging, I believe I have an uncanny ability to deal well with the unexpected. Never was this more true then when I was nine months pregnant with my daughter.
My husband and I weren’t able to move into the apartment we had committed to because the previous tenants refused to vacate. My husband unexpectedly lost his job, my mother announced she was moving to the Middle East, and my father-in-law was diagnosed with cancer. Perhaps unsurprisingly, I developed high blood pressure and my daughter arrived slightly early with some minor health issues.
While each one of those challenges was enough to throw me for a loop, I utilized that childhood resilience: handling one situation, resisting the urge to panic, and moving on to the next. Eventually, each was resolved and our life settled down. While I don’t like dealing with adversity, it’s reassuring to know that when it does occur I’ll be able to handle it.
Given my experiences, I’m not surprised that “resiliency” has become the newest parenting buzzword. Millennials — a generation that was said to be too coddled and cared for — are now parents themselves, and want their kids to have a better ability to overcome adversity than they themselves had.
We all know a friend who is still living at home in the basement, and we want to make sure our child doesn’t become that friend 30 years from now.
However, many millennials, myself included, don’t quite know how to foster resiliency. In order to learn how to cope with challenges, you have to experience hardship.
And it turns out that watching your child struggle — whether with learning to buckle her own car seat, navigating conflict in relationships with friends, or dealing with failure in class or on the sports field — is difficult, especially for parents of the generation that was always told everyone’s a winner.
For now, my daughter is young, and her 4-year-old problems usually have a quick and easy solution.
It’s tempting for me to handle them. Instead, I have to remind myself that ultimately my parenting goal isn’t to make her life easy, but to equip her for life, in all its messy, complicated glory.
As my daughter grows she’ll no doubt have struggles and failures, but I hope that she won’t experience the same amount of stress or hard times that I did as a child.
Still, I want her to emerge resilient and ready to face her challenges. Sometimes I wonder how I can accomplish one without the other.
Experts point to community connections, self-confidence and structure as things kids need to develop resilience. I’m doing my best to give my daughter all of these advantages.
However, I’ve (rather unscientifically) added in another ingredient to my recipe for a resilient kid: being open with her about the challenges that her father and I face, and how we overcome them.
Whether it’s talking about finances, sharing my emotions around a miscarriage or being honest when I’m away from home helping my father deal with mental health crises, I share my struggles in an age-appropriate way.
I never want to burden or worry my daughter, but I do want her to see first-hand that her parents are capable of handling whatever life throws at us — and so is she.