2 steps to wire your kids for resilience, according to parenting expert Dr. Becky
There’s no such thing as perfect parenting. That’s the big-sigh-of-relief viewpoint of Becky Kennedy, aka Dr. Becky—who considers herself “a clinical psychologist turned disruptor in the parenting support space,” she tells Fortune. There is effective parenting, however. “And the key to effective parenting … is what I call sturdy leadership,” she says.
Her model of sturdy leadership, as taught through her coaching company Good Inside, is all about helping parents understand their role and their kid, and how to then help their kids build the skills they need in life. “Not only to improve behavior, but to actually be fully functioning, successful adults,” says the mom to kids 7, 10, and 13.
A huge element of this type of parenting is setting your child up for a resilient, confident, successful future, stresses Kennedy. And you do that by “optimizing for your child’s long-term resilience,” she says.
Here, Kennedy explains how to keep up this approach in the day to day of parenting.
Pick your battles wisely
“There are moments when I optimize for my kids’ short-term happiness,” Kennedy admits. “I’m a human and sometimes I’m like, ‘You know what? Fine, have the ice cream for breakfast.’”
But for some percentage of the time, she stresses, parents need to be “long-term greedy,” meaning it’s important to keep in mind your kids’ future—and that they’ll likely be living away from you for more years than they’ll be with you.
“I believe the stakes only get higher,” she says. “I also believe that the single best gift I could ever give my kid is the ability to handle hard things—to have coping skills for what life throws your way, and to know that you can get through situations that are tricky.”
That’s what Kennedy believes gives kids a “bigger leg up in life” than anything else. “Life is hard … And our kids don’t get skills to work through hard things as a birthday gift. They don’t get them from reading a book. You get them through practicing those skills over and over and over.”
Refrain from fixing everything for your kids all the time
Finding difficult situations that can teach your kids about resilience is not the hard part. “You don’t have to insert hard moments—they can’t do a puzzle, they’re struggling with their math homework, they weren’t invited to the party,” Kennedy says, illustrating how they come at a regular clip, all the time.
What is hard, though, is not jumping in to fix the hard moments for your kids, whom you hate to see struggling or feeling upset.
“If I’m optimizing for short-term comfort, I’m going to fix the situation,” Kennedy says. And by doing that for your kid, she says, “they start to wire struggle with immediate solution.” In other words, “Their body goes, ‘I was left out from a party; my mom threw me a bigger party than that kid’s birthday.’ ‘I can’t do the puzzle; my dad finished it for me.’” And stepping in like that builds a set of expectations for your kid in the world, she explains.
“So fast forward many years and if this is a pattern, then when my kid has a delayed flight, my kid, at age 25, will call me in a tantrum, expecting me to personally rebook them on a different flight and pay money to do that, because their body’s saying, ‘I struggle, and my parent offers me immediate solution.’”
Instead, consider allowing your child the chance to push through the hard part and figure out their own solution. “Learning how to struggle is so important. That’s how you find success,” Kennedy says. “The better you are at struggling—not in a toxic way, but the better you are at staying in a moment of struggle—the more resilient you can be. And so I think about that as a guiding principle.”
Here’s how to wire for resilience
“I hate things that aren’t actionable,” Kennedy says. And so she offers two ingredients that can help parents wire kids for resilience every time they struggle: Validation and capability.
With validation, you are first validating that your child is upset. And you can do that by simply uttering “Oh, that stinks.”
“‘Oh, that stinks’ is the most underused parenting phrase,” she says. “Parents always expect me to say something super-sophisticated. ‘Oh, that stinks. Oh that’s the worst,’” though, gets the job done.
Next should be the “reflecting capability part.” That’s when you say something to the effect of, “‘I know we can get through this.’ My kid can’t do a puzzle. ‘Oh, you’re right. This puzzle is really tricky. I just know if you take a deep breath, you can stick with it.’ That is what wires a kid for that long-term resilience,” she says, “as opposed to short-term instant gratification.”
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