Resilience – how do we foster and help build resilience in children. Resilience is the ability to cope with unexpected changes and challenges in your life. While some events in life are unpredictable and not always possible to prevent, it’s how you strengthen your capacity to deal with these challenges that helps build resilience. It is using your own inner strength and having supportive relationships around you that helps to build resilience in oneself.
In order for children to harness their own resilience to cope with the changes and challenges in life they need the three R’s Routine, Rhythm and Rest. From a Steiner pedagogy anthroposophy recognises 12 senses that are divided into
- Four bodily (lower) senses – touch, life, movement and balance
- Four feeling (middle) senses – smell, taste, sight and warmth
- Four cognitive (higher) senses – hearing, language, thought and ego
These senses tell us when we are comfortable, however small children cannot voice this yet, this is where we need to be supportive and recognise their behaviour is telling us something else.
For us as educators in early childhood we try to endeavour to build supportive relationships with children using positive supportive language, show empathy and encouragement and empower children to try and then try again thus enabling them to use their own inner strength to give things a go. The addition of the new playground in Kurrajong is a great example of children trying to test their own resilience. For some children it is the ability to just hang from the monkey bars for others it is to cross the whole way and for some it is just the patience to wait their turn. This is just an example of a multitude of challenges that a child might face in their day and it is all their own journey. I also have to mention here a HUGE THANK YOU to the Parents and Friends Association and the site team for making this wonderful playground a reality.
However children cannot accomplish any task or build on their own resilience unless they have adequate rest, a rhythm that is predictable and routine, which is becoming harder and harder to achieve in today’s society, however as parents and educators we need to know the importance of these and how we can support the 3 R’s for children.
As parents and educators we need to set those loving boundaries, children need us to guide them and sometimes this is saying NO to certain things, when children recognise that an authority is loving and supportive with loving boundaries this too helps build their own inner resilence.
“Life doesn’t get easier or more forgiving, we get stronger and more resilient” Steve Maraboli
Parenting can be one of the hardest jobs and yet the most rewarding. There is plethora of material to help us as adults in our children’s lives but one in particular is called the Circle of Security https://crcs.com.au/programs-services/circle-of-security/ . This course helps us to recognise our children’s behaviour and how to support them and understand their needs and thus enabling them to be heard and build their own resilience.
With Love
The Early Childhood Team
