Catastrophies or Challenges

Your seven-year-old comes home in tears without the expected party invitation. Your four-year-old is disappointed because he won’t be the lead in the preschool play. Your eleven-year-old is anxious because none of her friends will be going to her secondary school next year.

Catastrophes? They can certainly feel like it for children. The sense of disappointment and rejection can be very distressing and as parents we hate to see them suffer. If we could wave the magic wand and make it all better no doubt many of us would.

Ever invited the entire class to a birthday party so as not to disappoint anyone or force your child to make a difficult choice? Ever included a prize under every wrapping of the pass-the-parcel so no one would miss out? Our mothers popped in only one prize for the lucky winner who unwrapped the final layer. That after all was the point of the game.

This generation of parents is trying to protect children more and more from life’s disappointments and difficulties. Ironically by doing this we make it harder for them to cope successfully and increase the vulnerable child’s chances of being hit by depression*.

Resilience training helps your child learn how to successfully manage disappointment, failure and difficulty. It’s a bit like immunisation for physical diseases. You can ‘inject’ your child with specific skills and attitudes that can make him resistant to pessimistic habits of thinking that can lead to depression.

The interactive CD-ROM Resilient Kids from Open Doors has been produced to help you do this. Let’s look at the background to this Australian program and how it can help you and your child avoid depression.

Personal Mastery

Resilient Kids is based on the work of American researcher Martin Seligman, author of The Optimistic Child. He investigated how a child develops high self-esteem and concluded that a crucial (and greatly overlooked) element is the ability to handle failure and disappointment.

According to Seligman a key contributor to the high level of depression found in children and young people is the avoidance of feelings such as anger, sadness and anxiety – wrongly described as ‘bad’ feelings.

Without opportunities to confront uncomfortable feelings children do not learn how to deal with them. For example, the parent who buys the younger child a toy to compensate for his sister having a birthday party denies him the opportunity to develop essential coping skills such as tolerating frustration and disappointment.

Rather than teach your child to avoid uncomfortable feelings, teach him to recognise them as valuable signals that here is an opportunity for personal mastery. This brings a sense of optimism even when experiences are difficult.

Failure – A building block for success

Mastering a task often means to fail, feel bad and then try again until there is success. Persistence is required in spite of feelings of failure. Playing computer games where there is exhilaration for the child who tolerates the frustration of failure and rises to the challenge to try again is a classic example.

Fairy tales often depict children overcoming difficulties and dangers and triumphing over witches and monsters. What ‘monsters’ might our children face in their daily lives? Bullies, friendship challenges, academic expectations, family upheavals, and much more.

By giving children the skills to identify, tolerate and act on uncomfortable feelings they develop personal mastery and experience triumph.

Take a lesson from your toddler. Toddlers are persistent! No matter how often they fall, bump their heads and tumble down steps, nothing will discourage them from reaching their goal. Without a resilient attitude to failure there can be no progress. In fact failure is an essential building block to success and should be talked about as such with your child when opportunities arise.

Parents are enormously influential through their modelling of social and problem solving skills and the way they handle their own experiences of failure and disappointment. By putting resilience skills into your own life and demonstrating them to your children in real ways, you will enable them to do likewise.

Some Starting Points

Here are some ideas to get you started building resilience in your children (and in yourself!).

See Saw Feelings

Explain that our feelings are extremely changeable, like a see-saw. We can feel very up, very down and in between, all in the matter of a day or even an hour! Knowing that painful feelings don’t last forever is important. 

Make a point of asking your child about the best and worst things that happened in their day and how they felt about them. (This can work better than the traditional question 'What did you do today?').

Regularly share with your child about your ‘see-saw’ feelings too.

Thought Catching

Children develop self-talking by 5 or 6 years. As adults we self-talk all the time. It is virtually impossible to switch off the running commentary in our heads. What flits across your mind at the times you feel worst? These first thoughts can profoundly affect your mood and how you will handle the situation, either optimistically or pessimistically. Our automatic thoughts usually accuse us of being stupid or bad and tell us the problem is all our fault.

The skill of thought-catching teaches us to recognise these first negative thoughts and gives us a chance to evaluate them.  They are not necessarily correct!

For example –

• How much is my fault?
• What part was out of my control? 
• Is this setback permanent or can I do something to fix things?
• Just because I failed at this activity doesn’t mean I will fail next time or at something else.

As they grow older, help your children recognise what automatic thoughts are and how to ‘catch them’ and question them.

Find Optimistic Explanations

Mastery skills involve the way the child thinks, particularly when he has failed. The child questions, ‘Why did I fail?' or 'Why did I succeed?'. Optimistic explanations are the basis of seeing failures as challenges with associated activity and hope.

Train your child to think of optimistic explanations for events. Look for opportunities to substitute optimistic explanations for your child if he tends to express pessimistic explanations for things that have happened.  Watch the way you describe events – both for yourself and for your child:

For Example

• Do you tend to use terms like ‘always’ and ‘never’ when things go wrong…('You never tidy your toys') or do you focus on the actual event? 'You forgot to tidy your toys. You’ll have to finish before you watch TV.'
• Do you describe setbacks as permanent catastrophes… 'I’m useless at cooking' or as incidents that can be acted upon? 'This cake didn’t turn out very well. I’ll try a different recipe next time.'
• When things go well do you call them ‘flukes’… 'You were lucky your teacher was in a good mood' or do you give your child the credit? 'Your teacher gave you the job because you are reliable.'
   

De-Catastrophising

When things go wrong teach your child to put boundaries on the problem. Ask:

1. What is the worst thing that could happen?
2. How likely is this?  If it were to happen, what could you do to improve things?
3. What is the best thing that could happen?

You have defined the best and worst boundaries. The most likely outcome would probably fall in between. This realisation gives a sense of security and motivation - I can handle it!

Problem Solving

When we intervene too much in our children’s problems we send a message ‘you can’t handle things’. Remain supportive and interested but let your child think through the situation on his own. Begin when they are pre-schoolers. If he gets stuck provide guidance but not answers.

• Encourage him to think of different possible explanations why this problem has occurred
• Help him explain the event optimistically and to come up with several solutions
• Check in with him about whether the chosen plan is working or does he need to try another way
• Don’t be overly critical of first attempts. Keep your eye on the process rather than the outcome at first
• Compliment every effort to approach problems well.

Storytelling

Use stories about yourself or other family members or point out the resilient words and actions of the characters in stories as you read to your child.

SKILLS FOR LIFE

We can’t always change the situations in which children find themselves, but we can change how they think about it and how they act. This is reality based optimism built on practical skills. You can find ‘teachable moments’ every day that naturally demonstrate and reinforce these skills to your child in real ways.

Once learned, your child will be armoured against failure and rejection for life. Bad things will continue to happen but you will have taught your child how to persevere and bounce back in the face of any setback.

By Alison Campbell Rate

Resources

Resilient Kids CD-ROM - An Australian life skills program that teaches:

• perspective taking
• tolerating failure
• optimistic thinking
• negotiation and problem solving,
• and more through interactive mini-stories and associated activities for primary and secondary levels. Comes with parent booklet

Available from:

Open Doors Counselling and Educational Services Inc.
5 Greenwood Avenue, Ringwood Vic 3134
Phone: 03 9870 7044 or 1800 647 995
Email: info@opendoors.com.au

Raising Real People: Creating Resilient Families, Andrew Fuller, published by Inyahead

Seligman, Martin, 1995, The Optimistic Child, Random House Australia.

*Note that in this article the term depression refers to a reaction to life events, not depression as a by-product of certain medications, nor where there is a physical/genetic component. 
 

This article was first published in Australian Family Magazine, February 2004. Update July 2009.