Resilience

What It Means

Resilience is the capacity to adapt well and keep developing in the face of serious hardship, stress or loss. The Harvard Center on the Developing Child finds that the single most common factor among children who develop it is at least one stable, committed relationship with a supportive parent, caregiver or other adult. It describes resilience as resting on three foundations together: supportive relationships, building adaptive skills, and positive experiences.

How Parents Say It

• "Kids are resilient, but they still need someone in their corner."
• "She bounced back faster than I did."
• "How do we raise kids who don't fall apart when things go wrong?"

The Breakdown

The three foundations, per the Harvard Center on the Developing Child

The Center describes the relationships as the active ingredient: they give a child responsiveness matched to them, help that steps back as skills grow, and protection that buffers development from disruption.

At each age. In our examples, the three foundations stay the same while what they look like changes with age. For a baby, a relationship is feeding and comforting reliably. With a teenager, it may be one trusted adult outside the family, like a coach, teacher or relative. The chooser above has examples for each age, which are our own.

When to talk to the doctor. After a loss, a move, a divorce or another hard event, talk with your child's doctor if changes in sleep, eating, mood, school or behavior last for weeks or get in the way of daily life. CDC recommends raising any concern about how your child plays, learns, speaks, acts or moves.

Good to Know

Resilience doesn't mean a child feels no stress or never struggles. The Harvard Center's point is that no child builds it alone: a stable relationship with a supportive adult, plus chances to practice skills and positive experiences, is the combination it names as the foundation. That supportive adult doesn't have to be a parent; the Center's wording includes caregivers and other adults.

Related Terms and Categories

• Growth mindset

  The belief that abilities like intelligence and talent can grow with effort, good strategies and help, a term from psychologist Carol Dweck.

• Emotional regulation

  The growing ability to notice a feeling and manage how strongly it shows and how long it lasts, so a child can calm down and carry on.

• Co-regulation

  The way a calm, caring adult helps a child manage feelings and behavior, through a warm relationship, a steady setting and coaching, until the child can do more alone.

• Executive function

  The mental skills that let a person plan, focus, remember instructions and control impulses: working memory, mental flexibility and self-control.

• Self-esteem

  How a person feels about themselves and what they can do. In a child, healthy self-esteem shows as feeling liked, accepted and able to try again after a mistake.

Parenting and child development