Hello kind grown-up,
We are halfway through this arc about resilience - and it feels like exactly the right moment to slow down and talk about something we often leave out of the conversation entirely.
Rest.
In our culture’s dominant story about resilience, rest rarely features. The story tends to go: something hard happens, you dig deep, you push through, you come out the other side stronger. The emphasis is almost always on the pushing through. On the effort. On the not stopping.
But this story misses something fundamental.
Rest is not a reward for resilience. It is a component of it.
The brain, when recovering from stress, difficulty, or emotional effort, does its deepest processing work not during active engagement with the problem; it’s done during rest. During sleep. During the undemanding, wandering, unstructured hours that we increasingly treat as a luxury rather than a necessity.
For children, this is especially important. A child who has had a hard few weeks - even weeks that looked ordinary from the outside - may be running on a depleted nervous system that needs genuine rest before it can do much more building.
Half term is one of the few moments in the school year when that rest is structurally available.
And yet many of us - with the best of intentions - fill it.
Activities. Outings. Catch-up on missed things. Visits that needed to happen. Experiences that will be good for them. The pressure to make the week count, to not waste it, to send them back to school having done something.
This week, I want to gently challenge that.
What genuine rest looks like for children:
Unstructured time with no particular outcome expected.
Physical rest - later mornings, earlier bedtimes, bodies that are simply allowed to be still.
Play that is freely chosen rather than directed - not educational, not improving, just theirs.
Time in nature, if possible - not a hike with a destination, just outside, at their own pace.
Screen time that is genuinely enjoyable rather than deadening - there is a difference, and children generally know which is which.
Time with the people they feel safest with, doing nothing in particular.
What rest does:
It allows the nervous system to regulate. It allows the brain to consolidate and process. It restores the energy reserves that resilience draws on. It reminds children - and adults - that their worth is not contingent on their productivity.
That last one is perhaps the most important of all.
A child who has only ever experienced rest as a reward - earned through hard work, granted when everything else is done - learns that stillness must be justified. That doing nothing requires a reason.
A child who learns to rest freely, without justification, learns something far more valuable: that they are enough, simply as they are, without performing or producing or achieving.
That is the foundation that resilience grows from.
This half term, try giving them - and yourself - a week that isn’t full.
See what grows in the space.
With warmth,
Lenny 🦁
