Resilience is estimated to be the human skill of the future; it is a capacity that the companies of tomorrow will value. And the first years of life are key to learning how to be resilient. We invite you to learn more about this important skill and how to help your child develop resilience from the first years of life.
The world changes in an accelerated way, the difference between what one generation lived and another is becoming more and more accentuated. Advances in technology, climate change, evolution in thinking and demands within the world of work lead us to reflect…
How to prepare children today for a panorama that
we do not know what it will look like when they are adults?
Skills like memorization or following directions prevailed in previous generations because the world of work required it. Today professional and personal success depends on other types of factors. Socio-emotional capacities have taken on greater weight in the profiles that growing companies demand.
Specifically, the RAE defines it as “the ability of a person or a group to recover from adversity to continue projecting into the future.” To understand it better, let’s think about palm trees. In the face of a strong storm, they usually do not break, they flex. As the heavy rains passed, they may have changed their shape, but they are still standing.
Social skills begin to develop from an early age in everyday moments. It is on that day today and in that routine where children discover how to relate to themselves and to their surroundings.
These recommendations will help you at home to develop the resilience of your children since they are very young:
- Find challenges to solve. Find something that is challenging but possible to accomplish. Depending on the age it can be climbing a ramp, playing hide and seek, jumping on a slightly higher slide or doing a puzzle. When your child strives to achieve something and discovers that he has overcome it, he will feel capable of facing a greater challenge.
- Delays the reward. Children are not patient, it is proven that if you give them a choice between having chocolate right now or two if they wait for longer, they will prefer to eat it without caring that they could have had a greater benefit (Stanford’s chocolate experiment). Helping children build that discipline to stay focused toward an end will allow them to face difficult times in life. Try to set concrete short-term goals that you can gradually extend, value the effort it takes to achieve it. An example is to collect coins and then go buy a toy.
- Maintain clear and constant limits. It is essential that your child knows what is allowed and what is not, that helps control his frustration. There will probably be times when you challenge that limit and it is normal, but finding out whatever your reaction is, the limit is unchanged, will help you generate internal strategies to understand and overcome your feelings.
- Find moments to educate. When your son asks a question like “but why ..?”, When he is playing mom or he represents a fight between dolls; You have a door to dialogue that you can guide to understand how feelings work and what we can do, for example, when we are sad. But when you are experiencing frustration or tantrum, it is not a time to educate, your system has stress levels that prevent you from reasoning or understanding, better wait for it to pass by accompanying you and validating the emotion, at another time talk about your feelings and strategies how to breathe or express what distresses you.
- Be patient. Socioemotional skills are practiced like any other. A child needs to try many times before he can walk, eat alone, or any other developmental milestone. It’s the same with social skills, no one masters it on the first try. Children need practice and support by reminding them of strategies they can use before having that tool in life.
While we don’t know what the world will be like when today’s children grow up, we can prepare them to adapt, stay calm in the face of adversity and overcome crises and even learn from it.