Below is the introduction to an article written by Dr Vicki Hargraves who shares some ideas around understanding resilience for kids and its importance in helping navigate the trickiness of life.

"All students will experience difficult situations at some point in their educational career, both academic and social. These may include teasing and bullying, conflict with teachers or parents, competition or disagreements with peers, homework, tests and class presentations, and the transition from one school to another. Resilience is the capacity to adapt well when faced with adversity or stress. It helps students stave off the potential negative psychological effects of challenging experiences. It involves more than continuing to persist despite difficulty: resilient students interpret academic or social challenges in a positive way. This may include increasing effort, developing new strategies, or practising conflict resolution.

What is resilience and why is it important for students?

There are several critical abilities associated with resilience, including:

• emotional regulation, or the ability to keep calm and express emotions in a way that helps the situation
• impulse control, which involves the ability to make a conscious choice to act on a desire (or not), as well as to delay gratification and persevere
• causal analysis, or the ability to analyse problems and identify causes
• empathy, or the ability to understand the feelings and needs of another person
• realistic optimism, or the ability to keep a positive outlook without denying reality
• self-efficacy, or the belief in one’s ability to solve problems and handle stress
• opportunity-seeking, or the ability to take new opportunities and reach out to others

In general, students with higher resilience tend to have more positive outcomes (including greater wellbeing) and exhibit fewer problem behaviours. This is because resilient people display the courage and motivation to face problems and difficulties accurately (rather than denying or exaggerating them) and maintain a positive mindset and the confidence to persevere. Resilience is identified as part of one of the New Zealand’s Curriculum’s key competencies, ‘managing self[i].

Resilience also leads to improved outcomes for students because it is related to students’ beliefs that they have the ability to influence their environment. Resilient students are high in autonomy and self-efficacy – they experience feelings of confidence and believe that things will work out. This sense of personal control gives students an advantage in making changes when faced with difficulty and it can moderate the effect of adversity on wellbeing.

Resilience fluctuates at different ages and developmental stages, and across different contexts. Resilience is not a character trait that children are born with, but is a developmental process mostly influenced by children’s experiences and relationships. Importantly for teachers and caregivers, this means that resilience can be learned and developed."