Are your children resilient?

Jul 16, 2014

Recently at a girlfriends house, I had my tarot cards read (secretly I love this stuff but can be a closed book when they are trying to open me up). My cards revealed that I need to let go of the reins a little and let my children make their own mistakes. I thought I was doing this but now I look back, I do try to protect them from being hurt or rejected, which may not always be the best way about it.

This got me thinking about how my children would handle a major set back in their lives. Are my children strong enough to handle rejection? Can my children pick themselves up after being knocked down and have a stronger ‘I can do it’ attitude? Are my children resilient?

As parents we do not want to see our children fail at anything, especially when they have worked hard to achieve it. As parents we know that failure or rejection is a part of life and at some stage everyone is going to have to face it. So as parents, we should be allowing our children to experience failure when they are young so they are more equipped to handle it when they are older.

I am definitely a person who looks at the world with the glass half full. Every now and then, the glass appears to be half empty but that usually only lasts a day or so. Recently I had a down 48 hours resulting from a few things that happened all at once. I cried for what I had lost, I felt sorry for myself for what I hadn’t achieved, I complained about how hard I work yet still not getting what I wanted and I cried again for failing. Once these emotions passed, I took back control of what I could and I let go what I could not change.

Baby steps is the way I will approach this. Letting my children feel rejection, not just understanding it, is the first step. When they do not succeed, I will allow them to feel the pain of failing before I try to step in to patch things up. I hope by doing this while they are still young, it will build a resilience to be able to pick themselves up and be strong enough to keep going when things get tough.

How do you help your children to resilient?

cheers natalie 

 

Since I’m only fourteen, I haven’t really faced anything that has made me want to give up what I’m doing. As well as this, I have, luckily, never had to experience something as horrible as some people have in the world. However, after talking to mum about my next big life event (year 12 exams), I have been forced to consider how I would react if I didn’t get the grades I needed to do what I want to do with my life (law school).

Obviously year twelve is a while a way but after talking to mum I was actually at a loss as to how I would react if I scored poorly in my exams. At the moment, if anything big happened to me I would most likely just brush it off and continue on with my life but something as big as exams, I have no idea how I would react. Unlike the mundane problems that I face today, if I failed my VCE, or even if I didn’t quite do as well as I would have liked, it would affect the rest of my life.

You have to score high marks to get into a university course for law so if I didn’t do as well I would never have my dream of becoming a lawyer. I think that it would be extremely hard for me to move on and do something different if I didn’t get my desired marks because if would drastically affect the future I want. Personally, I think that would be something that I would never really be able to let go of because it has been a dream of mine for years.

Of course, I would be able to move on with my life. It’s not like I would just give up and become a hermit who lives on fast food, I don’t think I could ever do that. If I couldn’t become a lawyer it would be a major setback in my future goals but I’m sure that I could bounce back (eventually) and find another dream to set my sights on. It would be hard, failing in something that can affect you’re whole future, but I don’t think I would ever let something stop me from living my life out happily.  

see ya Ashlea xx