Elusive Resilience

I once wrote a blog post a hundred years ago about kids’ resilience.  I said that I don’t think kids are resilient as touted, they are just not emotionally mature enough to be upset about the things that we think they should be upset about.  And I stand by that… it’s stood the test of time. 

My oldest child has lived in 7 houses in only two cities in her tender 13 years.  And we are just about to hop to an 8^th.  A huge consideration in making this house change has been this jaw dropping numerical situation.  She’s not a military kid or anything, just a regular child of divorce and re-marriage.   And she used to love the adventure of a new house.  Now she looks forward to this move being the final one.   She doesn’t even want to travel.  She just wants to sit still in her own walls and settle in.  She was never resilient.  She changed easily but she was little and everything is an adventure when you are little. 

I have four dyslexic kids.  The world doesn’t make sense to them in the crisp way that it does to others.  Letters swim and dance and frustrate.  And their youthful selves become pleasers, comedians, class clowns.  But over time that morphs into a sharp hatred for reading, an anger at school, a fear of certain failure.  They hit a turning point.  And take on a new persona – not a happy go lucky kid but an aire of sorrow and self loathing.  Not because their resilience wore off, incidentally, but just because they woke up one day sick and tired of weaving words and learned that the world just won’t be easy for them.   And the loss of that normalcy has created more pain, more therapy bills and has proven to me that resilience is indeed a mythical creature because it shouldn’t be something that wears off – real resilience should be forever. 

Resilience isn’t something that kids have because they are kids.  It’s something that kids grow into because their parents gave it to them.  Whether through hardship or tough love, resilience is grown, and learning how to carve adversity into strength is the ultimate learning challenge.   Maybe not the simplest trait to nurture but suddenly resilience is, to me, the greatest hallmark of burgeouning adulthood – that we can be flexible and responsible and adaptive. 

Small kids may be have a limited emotional repertoire that masquerades as resilience but ultimately to grow little people into big people who are patient, accepting and kind… well, that, ladies and gentlemen, is the ultimate feat of parenthood.