Building a Foundation for Resilience: Child Edition
What is child resilience? In our previous two blogs, we unpacked what resilience means for both parents and early childhood educators. Today’s blog takes a deeper look at the four key factors that contribute to building resilience in children at a young age—and different activities parents, caregivers, and educators can use to support early childhood development.
4 Key Factors to Building Resilience
Research has identified a key set of factors that predispose children to positive social-emotional outcomes, even in the face of adversity. These factors include:
Facilitating supportive adult-child relationships
The single most important factor for a child’s resilience is access to at least one stable, committed relationship with a supportive parent, caregiver, educator, or adult. These relationships serve as the foundation for resilience—and help prevent developmental disruptions. By having a stable connection with an adult, children feel increased confidence in taking risks and bouncing back.
Ways to achieve this:
- Spend regular time with your child where they have your undivided attention
- Ask your child about their day (use open-ended questions) and listen to their response
- Spend time doing things together
- Make sure your child knows you have their back and love them unconditionally
Building a sense of self-efficacy and control
When a child feels safe, supported, and has a good model of resilience, they’re able to persevere through challenges and setbacks. With this confidence, children believe they’re capable of performing certain tasks, achieving goals, or managing complicated situations. It’s not always easy to let children take risks—but this is a crucial step in building resilience.
Ways to achieve this:
- Allow your child to experiment and take developmentally appropriate risks
- Encourage your child to be active and partake in activities like running or climbing
- Give your child the space and opportunity to make decisions
Providing opportunities to strengthen adaptive skills
A child’s adaptive skills serve as their executive function capability. This includes daily necessities for success at school or at home, like the ability to prioritize, not get distracted, negotiate, and manage emotions. For young children, adaptive skills can be getting dressed, cleaning up, toilet training, or maintaining basic hygiene.
Ways to achieve this:
- Offer unstructured playtime—both alone, so they can figure out ways to entertain themselves, and with others, so they can learn how to work together
- Provide consistent discipline, so your child knows what to expect
- Don’t give in to tantrums
- Help your child process and manage hard feelings, like sadness or frustration
Mobilizing sources of faith, hope, and cultural traditions
Tapping into sources of faith, hope, or cultural traditions have an impact on building resilience. Being part of a greater community, particularly in difficult times, can be helpful and grounding for children.
Ways to achieve this:
- If you’re part of a faith community, consider ways to increase your family’s involvement
- Share family stories. Research shows the more family history and stories that a child learns, the greater their coping skills, attachment, and social emotional competency in adulthood (Emory University Family narrative Project, 2008)
- Consider spending additional time with extended family
- Join a community group or volunteer together
Our Impact
One Place is committed to developing new resources for parents and caregivers in Onslow County. By educating families and caregivers on the importance of social-emotional development and building resilience within your family structure, children are better equipped to navigate the ups and downs of life.
Learn more about our available resources for parents and caregivers here.