We value it.
A student who overcomes an academic challenge.
An athlete who picks herself up after a loss.
A child who perseveres.
Resilience: the ability of a person to recover readily from adversity
And here’s the thing…
As much as we value resilience, we are inclined to do everything in our power to avoid the necessity of it.
At the most public level, we watch Hollywood parents falsify resumes just so a child will not face rejection from a university. At the most private level, we do not want our child to stumble in the backyard.
Our instinct is to protect our children and so it should be. Any parent knows of what I speak. So, we have two competing realities.
1. The way a child builds resilience is through failure.
2. A parent’s instinct is to protect a child from failure.
I wish I could sum up the solution in sentences. That would be quite powerful, no?
I cannot.
I cannot anymore give you all the solutions than you can give all the solutions to your child.
You will need to err, stumble, and ultimately reflect on your own.
Your child will need to err, stumble, and ultimately reflect with you beside her.
We may play with semantics and couch failure in any terms we want, but it is OK to say I failed in this moment as a parent. It is OK for our children to fail an academic task or to falter athletically.
Perhaps if we just stand up, face our shortcomings, and leave room for the shortcoming of others, we can individually and collectively recognize one very important reality.
The resilience we hope to nurture in our children will be predicated by the failure we want least for our children.