Raising resilient kids: the role of parents in building courage and capability

Resilience isn’t something your child is born with – it’s something you help them build.

If you’ve ever wondered why some kids seem to bounce back from challenges while others get stuck in cycles of avoidance, the answer often lies in how they’ve learned to handle discomfort, and who taught them.

Resilience is not a trait: it’s a skillset. And just like learning to swim or ride a bike, it’s built through supported, gradual exposure to challenge, not protected avoidance.

The good news? Parents play the biggest role in shaping that resilience, often in subtle, everyday moments.

What is resilience, really?

Resilience is the ability to withstand, adapt to, and recover from stress or adversity. It’s not about pretending everything is fine. It’s about being able to feel discomfort in the face of changed circumstances and still maintain purpose and integrity.

My favourite definition comes from the psychologist Rick Hanson: “Resilience is like the keel of a sailboat; it keeps you balanced and moving forwards.” Every now and then a wave might push the boat over or strong winds could blow it off course, but over time it will self-correct. It’s strong and sturdy and has been designed to withstand those forces. The keel keeps the boat ‘weighted’ in the water while it travels through time.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, professor of risk economics at New York University, argues that children should not be protected from all painful experiences. Some things get stronger when placed under pressure – like bones, which need to bear weight to remain strong. Vaccines give us a taste of a virus and we develop antibodies that protect us from the more serious full-blown illness.

Another analogy is to consider a plasterer rendering a wall: with every layer of plaster applied, the structure becomes stronger. So too, with every exposure to and navigation through a challenging situation, we build a child’s mental strength.

The Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University distilled decades of research into four essential ingredients that go into helping a child develop resilience:

A child needs at least one stable, caring and supportive relationship between themselves and the important adults in their life.

Children need to develop age-appropriate mastery over their life circumstances. Those who believe they have some measure of control over their lives tend to do better. Simple things like mastering how to make their own bed go a long way towards a feeling of being in control of their lives.

Children need to develop strong executive functioning and self-regulation skills.

Children do better if they are part of an affirming faith or cultural tradition.

These personal characteristics are developed over time. They can be built and developed in a child through having difficult experiences and subsequently overcoming them.

For children to develop resilience they need numerous opportunities to make sense of life stresses. They need experiences of struggling followed by the satisfaction of having successfully coped. By having repeated opportunities to take risks and overcome those risks, they will have successfully wrestled with their anxiety. They will then be able to generalise what they learn to future adverse events.

You are their coach

Think of yourself as your child’s coach. Just as you would teach a budding tennis junior the correct forehand technique, reinforce it through gentle corrections and repeated practise, so too can you coach your child in the skills of resilience.

Sometimes this will be in the form of helping your child develop a series of mental blueprints to apply their internal locus of control. At others it will be providing a supportive presence as they face a problem. And others it will be teaching them how to manage fears or insecurities.

Key takeaways

You can help your child develop emotional strength, but they need real-world practice at overcoming adversity.

It is possible to construct resilience.

While there will be improvements in a child’s ability to understand things because of their increasing development, you will need to help them learn how to limit their anxiety.

Resilience isn’t taught with a lecture. It’s coached into place, day by day.

I wrote a comprehensive guide to help you become your child’s anxiety coach – funnily enough it’s called The Anxiety Coach: Every parent’s guide to building resilience in their child. You can order it here.

Want a more instructive approach? Anxiety Coach is a self-paced online course to help you develop a ‘parent-led’ approach and take on the role of the coach in your child’s life.

If you are the parent of an anxious teenager, we have Resilience In Our Teens for Parents, which equips you with a practical and easy set of tools, and a solid understanding of the theory behind these to enable you to build resilience in your child. With this you will receive a free copy of my book Engaging Adolescents.