Hello kind grown-up,
We have spent five weeks exploring what resilience actually is, how it’s built, and what it looks like in practice.
This final week, I want to suggest something that might be the most important of all.
Help your child look back.
Not forward - not at the challenges ahead, the transitions coming, the hard things still to navigate. Back. At everything they have already come through. At the accumulation of difficulty navigated, uncertainty survived, and hard mornings that turned into ordinary afternoons.
Most children, particularly those who have had genuinely hard experiences, have no idea how resilient they already are.
This is not false modesty. It is a genuine gap in awareness.
When we are in the middle of a hard thing, we are not thinking about what it says about our capacity. We are simply trying to get through it. The resilience is happening - quietly, without fanfare, in the continuing - but it is invisible to the child experiencing it.
Looking back makes it visible.
And visibility matters enormously.
A child who can look at a list of hard things they have already come through and see, concretely, that they came through them has something no amount of encouragement or reassurance can fully provide: evidence. Their own evidence, from their own life, that hard things are survivable.
That evidence becomes the foundation for facing the next hard thing.
How to help children look back:
Ask the right question.
Not “can you think of something hard you’ve done?” , which can feel like a test; instead, try “tell me about a time something felt really difficult. What happened?” Then listen for the coming-through that followed.
Name what you observed.
You have watched your child navigate things they have never named as resilience. Name it for them. “Do you remember when you started at the new school, and you didn’t know anyone? That was really hard. And you found your way.” The parent’s perspective on the child’s own story is often revelatory; they didn’t see themselves doing it, and your witnessing of it makes it real.
Include the small things.
Resilience is not only the dramatic survivals. It is the ordinary Monday that followed a hard Sunday. The friendship that wobbled and found its shape again. The thing that felt impossible at the beginning of term and feels ordinary now. These small continuings matter. Name them.
Make it physical.
Scarlett writes her list in a notebook. This is not incidental; the physical act of writing, of making the list tangible and keepable, does something that a conversation alone doesn’t. It creates an object the child can return to. Consider making this together, if your child is willing.
Add to it over time.
The list is not finished. It will grow with every hard thing navigated and survived. Returning to it occasionally, not in a crisis, just in ordinary moments, keeps it alive and current.
One more thing, and perhaps the most important:
If your child has been through something genuinely significant - grief, loss, trauma, serious difficulty of any kind - this exercise requires particular care.
The resilience they have shown in navigating that experience is real, and naming it is valuable.
And it is also important not to use the evidence of their resilience to minimise what they went through, or to imply that because they survived it, it wasn’t that hard.
Both things can be true.
It was hard. And they came through it.
Name both. Every time.
With warmth,
Lenny 🦁
