Resilience - can it be taught?

I have been thinking about resilience lately. It is quite the buzzword among parents of school aged kids. The ability of a child to bounce back from adversity is apparently a good marker of long-term happiness and success.

In recognition of this fact, primary schools now have entire programs devoted to developing this skill in children, and it starts in Prep. At my kids’ school, they run the Bounce Back Resiliency Program . 

According to our Parent Handbook, ‘It can help inoculate students against the possibility of not coping when faced with future difficulties or adversity.’

Obviously I don’t have a problem with this. In fact it sounds fantastic, and I wish we’d had something similar when I was at school. What does puzzle me is that schools (and many parents) now seem to bend over backwards to ensure kids are not exposed to anything which may constitute a ‘difficulty or adversity’.

When I was at primary school I was teased for having red hair, freckles and not being good at sport. (And once for vomiting all over everyone’s exercise books on a shared table, but that one was fair enough, I thought.) 

Teachers intervened very occasionally, my Mum gave me a few tips, but basically I had to work it out for myself. It wasn’t much fun, but I did learn. How not to treat others, because I knew it felt awful. How to be self-sufficient. That being funny could get you out of all sorts of situations. All useful things which have helped shape my character and for which I am grateful.

Now, bullying is knocked on the head at the earliest opportunity. And while I am certainly not condoning serious bullying, which can have disastrous long-term psychological effects, we also need to recognize that there is an enormous range of bullying, from mild teasing right up to the vile cyberbullying we have seen so much about on the news over the last 5 years or so.

My view is that kids should be able to work out how to deal with the lesser forms on their own, without needing a policy or a program or the involvement of a teacher. In fact, encouraging them to run to a teacher at the first sign of trouble is doing kids a grave disservice. It teaches nothing about resilience and everything about relying on adults to get you out of a tricky situation.

Something else I’ve noticed is that children are praised, encouraged and lauded for every effort they make, no matter how small. When my kid got a Student of the Week certificate in school assembly (for sitting on the mat promptly in the mornings!!!) I made the appropriate congratulatory fuss. He just shrugged and asked if he could have a biscuit. 

I realised that it was because every child gets a certificate at some point. Where’s the sense of achievement there? It has completely failed to be special. Is there any incentive to work hard? To be better? How will kids manage in the real world when they have never been told ‘You’re just not getting it’ or ‘you need to try harder’?

I can see now why we need the Bounce Back Program. We need to artificially create adversity to teach kids how to respond to something they are unlikely to experience on their own in the school environment because we have removed it.

Am I the only one who thinks we may be missing something here?

Maggie Sakko

The Bounce Back Program