Fredericksburg Parent

24 Fredericksburg Parent and Family • November 2023 Models of Resilience building BLOCKS: Children Will Listen Parents are a child's first teachers. Even after children enter their school-age years, the habits, responses and behaviors that parents demonstrate to their kids each day are foundational to how children construct their own responses to difficult situations. Dr. Tanya Meline, Director of Student Services with the Stafford County Public Schools, and Jenifer Bunn, Lead Social Worker for the Fredericksburg City Public Schools, offer the following ideas to help parents instill resilience in the home. TEACH EMOTIONAL VOCABULARY Meline urges parents to prioritize emotional literacy alongside other important skills. Just as parents are advised to name the objects around them to help young children build language skills, naming specific emotions can help build emotional intelligence—a crucial skill for resilience. "We tend to do happy and angry really well, but we don't talk about this spectrum of emotions that exist between those two," she said. Parents can help by using specific words to convey the emotions they are feeling to their children. This helps children learn to match distinct facial expressions and physical presentations with specific feelings—and to not assume that every furrowed brow is a sign of anger. "You might say, 'Right now, I am feeling nervous. This is what I am feeling nervous about,'" Meline suggests. "Normalize having the whole spectrum of emotions, and communicate that all emotions are OK. It's OK to be angry. It's OK to be nervous. It's what we do with our emotions that can cause conflict—not the emotions themselves." Building in more regular talk about emotions doesn't only help chil- dren—it also helps parents process their own feelings. "If you're teaching your child more emotional language, then you are also building your own emotional competency," Meline says. "Adults feel like we have to have it together all the time, but the reality is, none of us has it together all the time and that's OK. We have to learn to name what we are feeling then come up with a healthy way to express it." Bunn says it's important to build the habit of talk- ing before the need to have "big conversations." She acknowledges that sometimes the biggest challenge is just getting kids to engage with questions. To overcome this, Bunn recommends forgoing the big, open-ended questions for lots and lots of ques- tions with simple, closed-ended answers. "A lot of times kids, especially if they have expe- rienced trauma, are not ready for the higher-level deep conversations. You have to make basic conver- sation first," she said. "I will pull very random things out of the air to talk to kids about. 'What class do you have next? Do you like the teacher? Do you have any homework?'" As children get used to answering—and learn that it feels good to have someone listen to their answers—they will be more likely to open up in big- ger conversations. "These closed-ended questions can be what makes kids feel comfortable with having a back-and-forth conversation. It's a muscle you need to build," Bunn said. SEE MISTAKES AS OPPORTUNITIES Perfectionism drives a lot of anxiety in both children and adults. But a person who has never made a mistake has never had the opportunity to learn that they can recover and grow from that experience. Meline recalls a helpful exercise her husband practiced with one of her own children at a young age. "They would color together. My husband would make sure he went out of the lines, and then teach our child to turn a mis- take into something beautiful," she said. In many cases, a parent's instinct is to jump in and save a child from making a mistake. "That discomfort is what helps us change and grow," Meline said. "If we are constantly rescuing from that, then we are not allowing them the opportunity to grow." Parents can make small shifts in their language to guard against this. For instance, instead of inducing fear to prevent an acci- dent before it happens (a statement like, "Don't touch that—you might get sick."), take a more positive approach that puts the power in the child's hands (instead say, "Let's be sure to wash our hands after touching this."). "Growth is never comfortable," Meline said. "It's meant to stir up a little bit of angst, because that's the process of growing and changing." BUILD THE HABIT OF CONVERSATION Scan to visit our website for more information about resilience.

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