Cultivating Resiliency

Cultivating Resiliency in Our Children: A Note for Parents

(an excerpt from the upcoming book What the Bully’s Victim Does Not Want to Hear)

Patterns emerged. Predictable, preventable patterns of human behavior presented themselves over the ten-year period that saw me sit in a high school vice-principal chair in three different schools in three different towns – St. Thomas, Dorchester, and London, Ontario. In that role as a secondary vice-principal, my education in social psychology (my favorite subject in university) continued, in spades, with an emphasis on the behavior of exasperated humans. A good chunk of my time necessitated assisting incensed, often enraged, staff, students, and parents, and that is preciously where the patterns emerged - in strikingly similar fashion, from school to school and town to town.

A challenging teacher tactic, a problematic peer, or any other troubling teen experience that many teenagers could, for the most part, take in stride could completely derail other young souls leading them, at times, directly to me, their vice-principal. Sometimes the path to the VP’s office was prompted by behavior that deviated from the school’s code of conduct, sometimes by poor or declining attendance, and sometimes by the presence of debilitating mental health issues – all of which were calls for help, in my opinion.

So why were some teens undone by life’s challenges and others were not? I won’t pretend to have a simple answer or even acknowledge that a simple answer exists. No two human experiences are alike, and a myriad of variables are at play in any given situation let alone in any person’s life. Nonetheless, discernable patterns emerged. One in particular, had to do with parent responses.

What did many parents of the students I saw in my VP office have in common aside from an earnest, authentic, well-meaning, passionate concern for their child’s well-being? The answer: outward focus manifesting in the form of villain and/or victim perspectives. The parent unconsciously promoted the disempowering standpoint of looking outside of oneself for the alleviation of suffering. Now, don’t get me wrong: I did, and I do, believe that the school most certainly has a role and a responsibility to extend and provide assistance to struggling students, and school staff do and can point to a number of options and resources for addressing difficult circumstances, but the degree to which the parent failed to look inward for answers appeared directly proportionate to the degree to which any external measures of aid could be beneficial. Similarly, I do not mean to diminish some of the extremely challenging circumstances that some of these young people found themselves immersed in. Notwithstanding, the parent’s chosen perspective of the circumstances played heavily into whether or not there would be any success at addressing the teen’s issues.

Why is my emphasis on the parent’s response to the situation rather than on the child’s? In most cases, not all, the child imitated the response of the parent. Here is an example. The student struggles to maintain a sense of inner peace for any number of reasons. Anxiety grows. The parent attempts various ways to help, but the anxiety builds in spite of these efforts. The parent grows frustrated and even angry.

The student, desperately trying to avoid disappointing the parent and/or being at the receiving end of the parent’s anger, looks outside of him/herself for someone to blame, for this is something the child has observed the parent doing. (Sometimes, tragically, the well-meaning parent is actually the one to suggest that the entire problem lies with the fact that a teacher or peer owns full responsibility for the child’s pain.) The parent and child find common ground in blaming and vilifying others. This new bond feels better for both the parent and the child; it feels so much better than the helplessness it replaced. To be clear, some teachers and some peers have behaved in significantly challenging and even deplorable ways, but once that villain perspective dominates the parent’s point of view, the child becomes somewhat doomed, and the two of them fall miserably into victimhood – a debilitating frame of reference if ever there was one. Inadvertently, all of the child’s power is stripped away leaving despair, exasperation, anger, and even greater helplessness which, in turn, leads to misbehaviour, disengagement with academics and/or mental health deterioration.

What can parents do? Answer: examine their own way of responding to life’s big and small challenges, and model coping methods that steer clear of villain and victim perspectives. Encourage your child to consciously and intentionally choose to react to demanding, even devastating circumstances, with productive responses. Consider the following illustrations.

Situation: “That kid keeps putting untrue, unkind things about me on social media!’

Villain Response: “That kid is a low-life creep!”

Victim Response: “I haven’t done anything, and that kid is attacking me anyway!”

The villain and victim responses seem pretty normal actually; don’t they? One might argue that they are typical reactions. The problem is that they can grow to poisonous proportions. The villain response, left unchecked, turns into great hatred towards a fellow human being. The saying, “Hanging on to anger and resentment is liking drinking poison and expecting someone else to die,” comes to mind. Feeling hate leaves a person living in an ugly, unhealthy vibrational field which is why there are so many uplifting stories of people who have suffered great human loss and indecencies only to have found peace through forgiveness. Instead of feeding your child’s vilification of the teacher or peer, appeal to your child’s sense of compassion for others:

“People who are at peace with themselves, their lives, their families don’t go around hurting or striking out at others. That teacher’s/peer’s behaviour is all about his/her pain and not about you. Now, if they are breaking a school rule/employee standard or law, we can and probably should go report it to the school/police. They need help. But if this behaviour is not that extreme, then we can work together to explore options and find ways and resources that can help you to manage this difficult situation.”

Likewise, the victim response, when allowed to expand and dominate the frame of reference, leaves the child completely powerless, and a lost opportunity to model and teach empowering reactions falls away. Gone goes the chance to grow the following sorts of empowering sentiments that could carry the teen far in life:

“What you focus on grows. Block that kid on your social media. Ignore the kid completely. Direct your attention to the people and the things you love.”

“Even flowers need manure. You know in your heart you are worthy of better treatment. Take the high road; send them forgiveness, and don’t invest any more energy into thoughts of their inappropriateness. For sure, don’t talk back, text back, hit back, etc. as that just feeds the fire – it gives more energy for the unpleasant situation to continue burning and consuming your emotions in a detrimental way. Teach yourself how to rise above it like the flower in the manure.”

“What is this experience here to teach you? Everyone we meet in life is our teacher. Is there anything you own in this story? Is there anything you could have done differently to have not drawn this experience your way? I’m not saying that you deserve this treatment, but is there some way that you attracted this negative attention to yourself? Often negativity attracts negativity just like positivity attracts positivity.”

And so, the discussion, the lesson on resiliency, ensues!

I have over simplified the complexity of these diverse, delicate, and often devastating situations for the sake of attempting to offer a productive parenting perspective that can be applied in all circumstances. Nevertheless, I believe the empowering point to not lose sight of here is that, despite what many, including myself, have felt while raising teenagers – that feeling like you’ve lost all or most of your influence over your teen – a parent’s reactions to little and big, trying situations really can shape the teenager’s ability to remain resilient through the ups and downs of modern life. It is not enough to have good intentions: as a parent, we have the responsibility to do our own internal work, to examine how we cope, to catch ourselves from slipping into a villain or victim perspective, to aspire to react consistently in a heart-centered, compassionate way towards ourselves and others, to see life as one big adventure where each individual creates his/her own reality by what he/she chooses to focus on and by what lens he/she elects to view any given situation. Grow your own self-awareness. Reflect on how you handle the big and little bumps in life. Think it out loud. Let your children hear your thought process. Give them the gift of knowing that they have all the power in the world to select what thoughts to think and by choosing positive, loving, compassionate, life-affirming, inclusive ways of seeing themselves and others, despite the circumstance, they control the degree to which they will suffer in life.

Resilience