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Key takeaways for caregivers
- Decades of research points to specific ways parents can build resilience that can help protect children from the challenges of adverse experiences and stress.
- Strategies include parent-focused tips such as practicing self care, reflecting on one’s own past experiences, and developing emotional control.
- Additional strategies focus on ways to navigate relationships with children, including being a source of unconditional love and support, communicating, supporting children’s other relationships and activities, and adapting to changing needs as children grow.
A need to navigate challenging childhood experiences
We live in a world of adversity. Wars, climate change, rising mental health crises, bullying in schools, Internet predators. Parents today face these and many other issues as they help their children and teens survive and thrive.
In our recently published book, Raising a Resilient Child in a World of Adversity: Effective Parenting for Every Family, we have gathered proven strategies and simple guidelines to help parents succeed. Our book is grounded in research and was reviewed by a panel of experts prior to publication by the American Psychological Association.
Much of the research on resilience and adversity has come from Western cultures, although international research on resilience and the role of culture is growing.
We use the term parenting in our book and here, but recognize that caregivers and families come in many different forms, and face both common and specific challenges. Our book is for anyone caring for a child or adolescent, whether they are a parent, grandparent, aunt, uncle, or any other caregiver who wants to help children face the challenges and stressors of growing up today.
Adults bring their own histories and stresses to their parenting
Parenting is one of the most difficult and stressful jobs. Many parents struggle to overcome their own difficult childhoods and yearn to parent differently than they were parented. This can be particularly challenging for adults with a history of childhood adversity or what scientists call adverse childhood experiences (ACEs).
ACEs can include physical and emotional abuse and neglect; sexual abuse; family violence; divorce; or having a parent with mental illness, who was incarcerated, or who abused drugs or alcohol.
Research shows that ACEs can cause changes in the body’s ability to handle stress – in our brains, our cells, and even our DNA. These changes can raise the risk of both physical and mental health problems in adulthood, and may also increase the stress that comes from parenting, making it even more difficult.
10 evidence-based tips for building resilience in children
Based on our experience as researchers in child development and as parents, and drawing from decades of research on adversity and resilience, we recommend 10 actions parents can take to break the cycles of adversity and help themselves and their children become more resilient.
Our 10 tips to build resilience in children include:
- Take care of yourself
- Deal with the past
- Learn to control your emotions and be an emotion coach
- Nurture your children’s relationships
- Volunteer in the community with your child
- Establish rituals and routines
- Realize that sometimes parents need to take control
- Have conversations
- Support protective and compensatory experiences (PACEs)
- Adjust your parenting as children grow older
Let’s take a look at those 10 tips in more detail.
1. Take care of yourself
It’s hard to be a good parent when the adult’s basic needs are not being met. Especially when children are young, it is particularly challenging for parents to meet their own needs. While it may be tempting for adults to give all their energy to parenting, doing so takes a toll on the family in the long run.
Tips:
- Find ways to get enough sleep, take time for yourself, and ask others for help. This team approach to parenting is good for everyone because adults and children thrive when they have a larger social network and more people in their lives who care about them.
- Consider joining a parenting group or creating opportunities to engage in activities that replenish your energy. Such commitments can help you prioritize your health and well-being.
2. Deal with the past
Most people tend to parent the way they were parented. When individuals are under stress, they are even more likely to fall into familiar patterns, even when they know they may not be the best ones.
It’s hard to be a good parent when the adult’s basic needs are not being met.
Parents can work to break the intergenerational cycle of adversity by recognizing and dealing with their ACEs.
The first step is to recognize how their current ways of coping with adversity and stress are related to their childhood experiences. Most children learned to survive using strategies that may no longer be helpful.
For example, isolating oneself from others may have been adaptative in childhood and adolescence, but seeking support and learning to trust are important in adult relationships and in parenting.
Tips:
- Journal about the changes you want to make.
- Talk with your partner or friends about your past and how you want things to be different in your family.
- Consider seeking professional help from a qualified mental health provider.
3. Learn to control your emotions and be an emotion coach
It’s hard to be the grownup in the room when negative feelings overwhelm you. Current situations may trigger feelings from the past that prevent adults from thinking clearly or reacting calmly. When a parent can’t stop their baby from crying or talk calmly with their teen about the party they went to last night, it might raise feelings of failure.
Most parents encounter situations that overwhelm them, and learning how to cope with such instances in healthy ways is important for both health and parenting.
Tips:
- Investigate strategies such as mindfulness, deep breathing, and simply being aware of feelings and where they come from to help remain calm during the emotional trials that naturally accompany parenting. When parents stay calm, children feel safe and are less likely to become overwhelmed by negative feelings.
- Act as an emotion coach, teaching your children how to manage strong feelings. Emotion coaching involves labeling children’s emotions without overreacting to them, helping children realize what those feelings may signal, and problem solving how to handle them together without becoming overly distraught.
4. Nurture your children’s relationships
Having supportive relationships is one of the best predictors of resilience. This starts with unconditional love from a parent, letting a child know that they are loved no matter what, and that love and acceptance are not based on performance or expectations.
This can be challenging, especially when parenting a teenager, but parents can disapprove of certain behaviors and have clear rules while still providing support and love.
Tip:
- Encourage your children’s friendships and relationships with other trustworthy adults, such as coaches, teachers, and mentors.
5. Volunteer in the community with your child
Children learn empathy and perspective-taking by helping people outside their families. It can be a powerful experience for families when they volunteer and help people in their community as a family. Children learn the importance of helping others and see virtues such as kindness and generosity in action.
Tip:
- Consider volunteering at a local homeless shelter or soup kitchen, collecting canned goods for a community food bank, or helping clean up a neighborhood park or plant a community garden. These experiences also expose children to other caring adults, providing role models outside the home.
6. Establish rituals and routines
Children thrive when their world is predictable and not chaotic. Simply sticking to a daily routine can make a huge difference in a family. When children know what to expect, it lowers their stress.
For younger children, bedtime routines are key for good sleep for everyone. When children go to bed early, parents have time to themselves. Reading bedtime stories is a great ritual that benefits children’s learning and can be enjoyed by all.
As children get older, clear rules and limits help them learn acceptable behaviors and how to get along with others.
Rituals are also important, not just on holidays, but to establish priorities and create an identity as a family. Shared family meals can be especially valuable.
Tips:
- It may be difficult to start a routine, but having a family meeting and coming up with plans together is a good way to get everyone on board. Write down daily routines as a family and agree on rules and consequences together.
- It may be hard to make time for family meals amid busy lives. Try to make a commitment to increase the number of times you sit down together as a family to have dinner (or breakfast) each week.
7. Realize that sometimes parents need to take control
The idea of gentle parenting, also called parenting without punishment, has become popular recently and has many positive aspects. However, sometimes parents need to be in control and to be more firm than gentle.
Decades of research has found that overly permissive parenting can lead to behavior problems for children in the long run.
We propose an approach to parenting that balances the need for parental control with children’s need for independence. These balancing acts change as children grow older. It can be tiring and difficult to always be the adult and not give in to children’s wants and demands. But children need to be able to count on their parents to make important decisions and keep them safe.
Tips:
- Don’t shy away from non-harsh discipline when needed.
- In hundreds of studies of parenting and child development, natural (naturally occuring) and logical (parent-imposed) consequences have been shown to be effective strategies for discipline. For example, if a child forgets to pack their lunch, a natural consequence is that they feel hungry. If children are fighting over what to watch on TV, a logical consequence is that you turn the TV off. Use these styles of responding to undesirable behavior to both manage the current situation and help children learn what is or is not appropriate.
8. Have conversations
Children and teens face many trials in today’s world, including fears about growing up, bullying, anxiety over doing well in school, exposure to drugs and alcohol, and online dating apps. Having a good parent-child relationship is one of the best ways to raise resilient children.
Decades of research has found that overly permissive parenting can lead to behavior problems for children in the long run.
If parents don’t talk to their children and adolescents about such matters, young people will go to their friends or the Internet to learn. There is a lot of misinformation out there, some of it dangerous, and parents should be a source of support and accurate information.
Tips:
- Have regular conversations with your children about big and small matters.
- Stay calm and ask for children’s thoughts and ideas during conversations so they will come back to you for support and advice in the future.
- Take advantage of car rides, bedtimes, and family meals to ask your children about their day or invite them to share their thoughts on big and little issues.
9. Support protective and compensatory experiences (PACEs)
Studies from all over the world of children who experienced adversity but did well in spite of it point to specific activities and experiences that helped them build resilience. Inspired by that research, we came up with a list of 10 protective and compensatory experiences (or PACEs) as an antidote to ACEs (see our previous blog).
Having caring relationships – with parents, other adults and family members, peers, and social groups – is essential, but children also need opportunities to be physically active, enjoy a hobby or develop special skills, and to have the necessary resources to learn or go to a good school.
Tips:
- Help children build and maintain healthy relationships with family, peers, and other adults.
- Support children’s involvement in both school and extracurricular opportunities. You may sometimes wonder why you’re driving your children to so many activities. But research has found that these experiences foster resilience, and build the self-esteem and skills needed to succeed as children grow and become adults.
10. Adjust your parenting as children grow older
As children grow older and occupy different stages of development, parenting and its components (e.g., fostering resilience, identifying appropriate best practices) change. Parents encounter both challenges and opportunities along the way.
Like a road trip, the journey of parenting has twists and turns, roadblocks, and bridges. In our book, we offer a roadmap for parents, with different options for how to build resilience in children, how to be a safe driver, and how to eventually hand over the wheel.
Tips:
- Pay attention to your child in the moment and be ready to adjust if a previous strategy no longer seems to be working well.
- Take into account children’s changing abilities and needs, and try giving them more control and responsibility in situations where they are most likely to succeed and the stakes are not too high. Gradually work your way up to handing over the wheel in bigger situations.
- If problems arise, consider ways to increase support without punishment. You and your child are navigating the changes in the road together and can adjust as a team.
Sharing our experiences as parents and developmental psychologists to help build resilience in families
Our book is based on our experiences as parents and developmental psychologists. We also share stories of our own children (with their permission) and our own struggles as parents. Parenting is a balancing act, and we believe that everyone benefits from science-based information and practical tips for navigating the journey.
For more information and details, please see our book and website. We hope our ideas help you foster resilience in your child and assist you in becoming a more resilient parent and adult.
References
- Felitti, V. J., Anda, R. F., Nordenberg, D., Williamson, D. F., Spitz, A. M., Edwards, V., & Marks, J. S. (1998). Relationship of childhood abuse and household dysfunction to many of the leading causes of death in adults: The Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) Study. American Journal of Preventive Medicine, 14(4), 245-258.
- Gottman, Mordechai, J., and DeClaire,J., Raising an emotionally intelligent child. Simon and Schuster (1998)
- Hays-Grudo, J., & Morris, A. S. (2020). Adverse and protective childhood experiences: A developmental perspective. American Psychological Association.
- Hays-Grudo, J., Morris, A. S., Beasley, L., Ciciolla, L., Shreffler, K., & Croff, J. (2021). Integrating and synthesizing adversity and resilience knowledge and action: The ICARE model. American Psychologist, 76(2), 203-215.
- Larzelere, R. E., Morris, A. S. E., Harrist, A. W., Cavell, T. A., & Del Vecchio, T. (2013). Authoritative parenting: Synthesizing nurturance and discipline for optimal child development. American Psychological Association.
- Masten, A. S. (2001). Ordinary magic: Resilience processes in development. American Psychologist, 56(3), 227-238.
- Morris, A. S., & Hays-Grudo, J. (2023). Raising a resilient child in a world of adversity: Effective parenting for every family. American Psychological Association, Life Tools.
- Morris, A. S., Jespersen, J. E., Cosgrove, K. T., Ratliff, E. L., & Kerr, K. L. (2020). Parent education: What we know and moving forward for greatest impact. Family Relations, 69(3), 520-542.
- Morris, A. S., Ratliff, E. L., Cosgrove, K. T., & Steinberg, L. (2021). We know even more things: A decade review of parenting research. Journal of Research on Adolescence, 31(4), 870-888.
- Ungar, M. (2013). Resilience, trauma, context, and culture. Trauma, Violence, & Abuse, 14(3), 255-266.