Having a child really is like having your heart on the outside of your body.
More than anything you want to protect that child. You wish you could wrap her
in a downy quilt. You wish you could encase him in bubble wrap. But you can't,
and even if you could it probably wouldn't be a very good thing. Why? We
want our kids to be strong. We want them to be passionate. We want them to be
compassionate. We want them to grow. So what is a realistic goal it's not total
protection? It's inner protection. It's building resilience in our children. What
is resilience? It's about the ability to bounce back from challenges and perhaps
sometimes even to grow precisely because of those challenges. So often when we
talk about resilience we talk about it only in terms of recovery, only in terms
of bouncing back but I believe it's so much more. Sure, it helps us to deal with
challenges, but when we have the inner strength that comes with resilience it
also gives us the ability to flourish in the best of times.
Resilience is a mindset. It's about how you think. To understand, why you have to
understand that resilience is about dealing with stress in an appropriate,
healthy way. To understand stress, you have to understand that we all come from
the jungle. Fifty thousand years ago, that's where we were. Now, when we were in
the jungle, what was the most dangerous thing that could happen to us? It was
getting eaten by a predator, a tiger attack. And if you aren't sure what I'm
meaning yet, think about your body. Think about all the changes that go through
your body when you're stressed out. What's the first feeling you have? That
tightening in the stomach, those butterflies. That is about the blood
leaving your belly to go to your muscles so you can jump and then run and escape
the tiger attack. Your heart beats fast. Why? So you can pump that blood. You sweat
so you can cool off while you're running. You breathe faster and more deeply to
get the oxygen. Your pupils get big so you can jump over
the log even if it's dark out so you won't get eaten by the tiger. And you
can't think clearly when you're stressed. Why is that? Because you're not supposed
to turn the tiger and say, "really, I knew you can work this out." We're not supposed
to negotiate during times of maximal stress. If you understand this, you
understand why resilience is a mindset. Because if you see things as a tiger
attack that are not really dangerous, they can't really destroy, you won't
be able to think. So resilience at its core is being able to tell the
difference between a real tiger versus something that just feels scary. But
resilience is about so much more than how you think. It's also about the
supports we put into kids lives and the circumstances that they're gonna need to
navigate in those lives and whether those circumstances overwhelm or
strengthen them. And believe me when I tell you that whether circumstances will
overwhelm or strengthen your child has a lot to do with your support. It's
critically important to understand that resilience is something that can be
built. While some people definitely have the traits that make them more or less
likely to be resilient, like how biologically anxious they are, it's
critically important for us to understand that it is about the people
surrounding the child that make a difference. It's about us. We know this to
be true even in the worst of times, times that I hope your child never comes close
to experiencing. But we've studied childhood trauma, when really bad things
happen to children, and we know that that affects their body, their brain, and their
behavior over their lifetime. But we also know that when children have a loving
adult who's standing alongside them, they end up looking like almost everybody
else. That is a powerful new piece of knowledge for us to understand. You know,
we're talking about resilience but you mustn't think that resilience means
invincibility or invulnerability. That's not our goal. It can't be our goal not if
we want kids who are going to be compassionate and who are gonna be
passionate. Where do you get that from? It's from life experience, the experience
of having something going wrong and needing to reach
out, being able to relate to other people. Those challenging times build who we are.
It's also not possible. It's not possible to make a person invincible or
invulnerable. What is possible is to see emotions as blessings, right. Resilience
is about learning to leverage our emotions. We want kids to care and if you
care a lot, sad things might make you sadder.
Things that make other people nervous might make you more nervous, but that's
what's gonna bring out your passion and your compassion. So it's not to stifle or
take those emotions away, it's to work with them and teach people how to use
them so that they can become their best selves. I want you to know the resilience
is uneven. It's not like you are either resilient or not and it's a label that
you wear. It really is about the circumstance you need to endure and we
all have limited energy and what that means is, say a kid's going through
a lot of stress at school. Don't be surprised when that kid's gonna fall
apart at home because they feel so safe they can. On the other hand, if things are
really stressful at home, your child might learn that she needs to protect
the people at home and so she's gonna become a perfect little girl,
not what I recommend but it might be what she needs to do. And then her stress
is gonna come out at school. Resilience can be uneven. What 60 years of research
tells us about who ends up being resilient and who doesn't: young people
be resilient when the important adults in their lives believe in them without
condition and hold them to high expectation, meaning being their best
selves. Who should that adult be? It should be parents. And what it is, people
like me who are supportive of kids are additive. But for some reason when
parents are under too much stress to be that singular adult in a kid's life, then
people like me become even more important. But for all kids, the more
adults, the more positive loving connections the better.
And what does it mean to believe in a child without condition? That doesn't
mean that you should look at your child and say, "it's okay to do drugs, darling." No,
it means you're not going anywhere, that your presence is absolutely something
that they can rely on. And what does it mean to hold someone to high
expectations, to be their best selves? That's not about grades. It's not about
trophies it's not about scores. It's about knowing your child. When kids are
seen for who they really are, their essential goodness and those are the
things we can see in kids when they're two years old and when they're three
years old. And when we see that in a child and we hold them to be their best
selves, those kids will end up being resilient. What is love? Love is seeing
somebody as they deserve to be seen, as they really are. Not based on what they
might be producing or a behavior they might be displaying. And when we love
kids in that way, what we tell them is that they're worthy of being loved and
that's the root, the essence of security. And that security is what enables a
person to bounce during difficult times and to reach out to other human beings,
to be able to join with them in an effort to be able to handle those
challenging times, but also to flourish during the best of times.