Resilience

I started writing a resilience article as a thought piece, but it felt very self-indulgent (which it was). In it I used an analogy, so instead of presenting my unsubstantiated opinion, here's a fictional story:

The waterfall

The children and their parents stood at the bottom of the waterfall. It was beautiful, the water rushing down, the rocks shining and gleaming as the cascade tumbled past and clouds of water droplets shone in the sunshine. Each side there were large boulders, suitable for climbing. “Let’s go to the top!” said mother. The children looked excited. 

“No.” said father. “It’s wet and slippery, and could be dangerous.” Of course, it would involve some risk – but with care the waterfall could be ascended quite safely.

 

 “Come on,” said mother, feeling the risk was acceptable.

 “No.” said father. Unwilling to take a chance, however small, on any of them slipping. 

“I’ll go,” said mother, “and tell you what it’s like”. She climbed, and it was safe – the rocks at the side were not wet and slick and were easy to climb. She reached the top. She had assessed the risk and anticipated the reward – and reward there was! The view was amazing – watching the cascading water below and looking across the fabulous landscape at the top. 

“Come on up,” she shouted down. “No.” said father and the children listened to him, because they always obeyed their father, even though they could see mother at the top, and how happy and excited she was, and they wanted to see and feel that too. The children missed out on the view, and the experience. They may have slipped, they may have bruised or even broken, but they never found out how beautiful it was to feel the thrill of climbing a waterfall and reaching the top. 

Do you think that we protect our children too much, that we don’t teach them to manage risk but to avoid it? Do you think this impacts their capacity for resilience and, long term, mental health?After posting this on LinkedIn – I was usefully directed to this by Josie Jacobs: ‘The Gift of Failure’ by Jessica Lahey - which speaks directly to this issue. She describes us as the generation that “invented over-parenting” - and despite our best intentions, we are robbing our children of their failures and therefore their learnings…and their natural resilience! When we take away our children’s opportunities to fail and learn (FAIL = First Attempt In Learning no less!), they never learn to trust their instincts and develop their innate resilience. We are in fact a very resilient bunch but - true of adults too - we have all lost touch with our own intuition. It’s not just parents but schools too - a friend’s school has just banned football because people were getting hurt… what about if we taught our kids HOW to play nicely or HOW to climb 🧗🏽‍♂️ safely… both the boulders you speak of, and this life?! 😊