Building Resiliency

Jan 11, 2024

What comes to mind when you hear the word “resiliency”?

-Natelle Austin

I think about this topic often as I work with students, parents, and teachers. Our previous head of school, Tim Lugg, shared a challenging article on resiliency a few years back. He loves baseball and tied that into the topic. Please enjoy his challenging encouragement in the area of resiliency:

Players in the major leagues endure a long path filled with obstacles, and many athletes are just as talented and do not get the same opportunity. The road for most baseball players is to play for teams in their hometown while growing up, compete at the college level (though some jump right to the pros), get drafted by a professional team, and work through the four levels of the minor leagues. It is like starting all over at every level because the competition jumps, and players either get better or get moved back down. Remember that all ballplayers at each level are talented, so that an individual could get discouraged and quit at any point. Those who succeed are not necessarily the most talented; they may have the most resiliency.

An important task for parents is to build resiliency (popularly called grit) in their children. The only way to encourage this tenacity is to allow children to face struggles and work their way through them. Parents must ensure their children experience their love through kind words of affection and constant encouragement. However, love does not mean rescuing them when they face difficulty; love is the opposite. How did those ballplayers develop such resilience? Not through their parents complaining about their coaches. At some time in their career, most of these players faced discrimination, were overlooked, and were mistreated, yet they did not let these obstacles deter them.

In some ways, this skill goes against our instincts as parents since we want to protect our children from facing pain or hardship, not encourage it. Our era has created the term helicopter parents, and I recently heard some changing it to velcro parents because parents see it as their job as a protector to be there with their children all the time. This is a false idea that serves to harm children rather than help them. A good illustration of this comes from the forest. Trees that grow tightly together only face the full fury of storms if the trees are thinned. Should all the surrounding trees be removed, those protected quickly blow over when high winds come. Contrast this with the tall campus tree between the administration building and the Activity Center. Without protection, it has stood firm through decades of violent storms, and it has only grown more resilient because of them. It may blow down, but it will take a mighty wind to do it.

Parents, please allow your children to work through difficulties. I urge you not to harm them with a false idea of love. To correctly understand love, you might meditate on 1 Corinthians 13:4-7 which rightly shows love to be a verb, not a feeling. It says, “Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrongdoing but rejoices with the truth. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.” It is not easy to “bear all things,” but that builds the resilience our children need.

-Timothy Lugg

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