Some thoughts on all this social-emotional and "resilience" skill-building you may have been hearing about.
I was scrubbing the cast iron pan and thinking maybe it was time to get a new scrubber, and an interesting blog post I read that morning kept coming back to me. It was from Miranda at The Mommy Blog. Miranda questioned the idea of pushing parents to teach resilience to our kids.
I’m totally with her there. Is resilience really something that can be taught? You gain resilience through life experience. Maybe kids aren’t able to handle as much as we think they should because they are constantly being taught and entertained. But how do we even know they’re not resilient? Where is this coming from?
And if there really is a problem with reslience, what about just…letting kids get bored?
Being bored forces you to use your imagination. It trains you to come up with ideas, to make decisions, to rely on yourself.
But kids aren’t allowed to be bored now, are they?
This goes along with the whole focus on social emotional learning. When I was teaching, that was a big thing. I loved what a colleague of mine said: “If we were allowed to hold them to high expectations, they would naturally feel more confident and proud of themselves as they experienced success.”
We seem very insecure as a society right now.
Why do we assume our kids wouldn’t be confident and wholesome if we stopped getting in their way? It’s adults who have loaded them up on screens, social media, sugar, and constant activities, and in doing all that taken away a bunch of their sleep. Of course they’re going to struggle. So now we feel we have to counteract that with resilience and social-emotional learning. It’s like waiting to get sick and then taking medicine to “fix” the problem instead of focusing on preventing it by looking at nutrition and lifestyle.
Oh wait, we do that, too.
- Jessica
I’m totally with her there. Is resilience really something that can be taught? You gain resilience through life experience. Maybe kids aren’t able to handle as much as we think they should because they are constantly being taught and entertained. But how do we even know they’re not resilient? Where is this coming from?
And if there really is a problem with reslience, what about just…letting kids get bored?
Being bored forces you to use your imagination. It trains you to come up with ideas, to make decisions, to rely on yourself.
But kids aren’t allowed to be bored now, are they?
This goes along with the whole focus on social emotional learning. When I was teaching, that was a big thing. I loved what a colleague of mine said: “If we were allowed to hold them to high expectations, they would naturally feel more confident and proud of themselves as they experienced success.”
We seem very insecure as a society right now.
Why do we assume our kids wouldn’t be confident and wholesome if we stopped getting in their way? It’s adults who have loaded them up on screens, social media, sugar, and constant activities, and in doing all that taken away a bunch of their sleep. Of course they’re going to struggle. So now we feel we have to counteract that with resilience and social-emotional learning. It’s like waiting to get sick and then taking medicine to “fix” the problem instead of focusing on preventing it by looking at nutrition and lifestyle.
Oh wait, we do that, too.
- Jessica