You can also listen to this episode on our podcast Parenting in Real Life to learn more about the tools for raising resilient kids.
Our kids’ elementary school has a kickball tournament at the end of the year. Last year a kid got hit by the ball and tripped. The weird thing was, he landed on a kid’s knee so it messed up his mouth and he got injured pretty badly. It was unfortunate and the odds of that happening were so slim. Someone getting hurt that bad during a sports event like that doesn’t happen often.
But it did make us wonder, will they shut down the tournament? Someone got hurt so is the fun over for everyone?
As a parent, we often do whatever it takes to keep our children safe from harm and danger. But should we be doing this? Part of growing up is taking risks and making mistakes. Sometimes accidents happen and learning how to handle those situations is part of the human experience.
What research is finding is that protecting our kids at all costs is actually hurting our kids and making them fragile.
The Coddling of the American Mind
In our last podcast episode we talked about the book “The Coddling of the American Mind” where they talked about 3 untruths that we are teaching our children which is making them fragile. These untruths are:
- What doesn’t kill you makes you weaker
- Always trust your feelings
- Life is a battle between good people and evil people
The world is teaching us to protect our children at all costs, that we should always trust our thoughts and feelings, and people are either good or bad. When we align our beliefs with those thoughts, they are finding that our children get to college and don’t know how to handle when something hard happens or when they don’t agree with someone.
So what do we do about? How do we raise resilient children?
The authors have a website with some great resources on things we can teach our kids to help them be more resilient. Here are some of the things they suggest:
- Assume your kids are more capable than last month.
- Let your kids take small risks.
- Give your kids a little more freedom like walking to school on their own. We do Gabb watches for our younger kids and our older kids have Troomi phones which are both super safe for kids and have parenting portals where you can track your kids. Use the code: Parenting for $50 off a Troomi phone!
- Teach your kids how to have productive disagreements. Read how we’re doing that in our family with a family council jar.
- Teach your child mindfulness.
- Teach your child to give people the benefit of the doubt.
- Have family screen time rules (listed below).
Kid Screen Time Rules
The book also gave some guidelines to help our kids with screentime. From research we know that this is not the only reason our kids are anxious and depressed, but it is definitely part of the problem.
If you want to try a no screen challenge, you can learn all about that here!
Here’s what they suggest:
- All screens are out of the bedroom by a set time.
- No social media until high school.
- Agree on a time budget and stick to it.
As a parent, it can get overwhelming with how crazy the world is right now and how much our kids have to deal with. What we can do for our kids is to teach them how to be more equipped for the road ahead by giving them unstructured play time and responsibilities, let them do things on their own and trust them, and wait before high school until they can be on social media.
These parenting tips can often be very different than what the world is telling us. Do you agree with what they’re teaching?