10 Strategies to Help Students Build Emotional Resilience
10 Strategies to Help
Students Build Emotional Resilience
Emotional resilience provides limitless benefits for children. Here’s how you can teach your students to have emotional strength in the face of adversity.
What is emotional resilience?
From an early age, children encounter various challenges and obstacles, which persist and evolve as they mature into adulthood. But resilient children make for resilient adults, and teaching children emotional resilience helps them adapt to challenges, manage stress, beat anxiety, and face uncertainty.
Despite the challenges children endure, when they can learn emotional resilience skills they learn how to bounce back from tough times. Educators play an essential role in helping children to develop emotional resilience, it is a work done in partnership with the child’s parents.
In this article, we will explore why emotional resilience is crucial for a child’s mental health, the strategies you can use to help build emotional resilience, and some free tools Friendzy offers to make your job of encouraging emotional growth easier!
Why Emotional Resilience is Important for Children’s Mental Health
Emotionally resilient people can effectively navigate difficult situations without dissolving into a soupy mess of doom and gloom. They have a strong sense of purpose and identity, which allows them to connect with others, win friends, and be more successful than their non-emotionally resilient peers. Here are several more reasons why emotional resilience is so critical for children:
Help recover from setbacks – Life is full of setbacks. Still, teaching kids valuable stress management skills will give them the tools they need to recover while allowing them to handle more significant stressors in the future.
Better coping mechanisms – Resilience helps children sail through stressful events. Learning healthy coping mechanisms for stress can help prevent future toxic behavior as an adult.
Addresses mental health risk factors – Healthy management of emotional pain, negative emotions, and uneasiness can help mitigate long-term mental health impairments.
Resilient individuals can stay calm in adversity, making great leaders and creators.
Help your students stay one step ahead emotionally with Friendzy’s social-emotional learning (SEL) program designed to increase student well-being. Schedule a demo today and discover the difference Friendzy can make!
10 Ways to Help Children Build Emotional Resilience
Educators play a critical role in childhood development. They don’t only teach facts and figures, but they also teach students skills that prepare them for the real world. Teaching emotional resilience enables educators to teach skills that won’t prompt that all too familiar question, “How does this apply to real life?”
1. Build a strong emotional connection - Building strong, caring relationships with children is an excellent starting point in molding psychological resilience. These relationships go a long way in developing emotional intelligence.
Influential people–teachers, faculty, and parents–can show unconditional support and encouragement, which helps provide a sense of social support. It’s important to remove distractions, which can prevent quality emotional connection. Spend time one-on-one with children and put their attention first.
Building an emotional connection with your students is easier than ever, thanks to Friendzy’s Freebies and SEL Exit Tickets. These tools can help children retain the impactful lessons they learn to foster emotional awareness and self-confidence. Try them for free today!
2. Encourage healthy risk-taking - Few things create anxiety more than a helicopter parent disappearing during stressful situations. To combat these feelings, push students from their comfort zones through activities that won’t cause harm if they are unsuccessful.
Challenging children through head-on confrontation helps build healthy risk-taking and resilient behaviors. Providing a safe space for children to succeed and fail through social events, new sports, or after-school activities can push social boundaries.
Prepare your students for new opportunities with a “Yes I can” attitude. Download the Yes I Can: Growth Mindset freebie from Friendzy to facilitate inner strength during new, socially challenging situations.
3. Resist the urge to fix the issue and ask questions instead - When we see loved ones hurting, our first instinct is to fix the issue. However, when teaching children emotional resilience, a better approach is to ask thought-provoking questions. Asking questions stimulates self-awareness, allowing students to work through problems logically.
Create a safe space for discussing emotions with Friendzy’s Daily Check-In tool. The Daily Check-In tool aids students in developing self-awareness of their emotions. It provides an avenue for exploring their feelings in a way that encourages self-compassion and resolution. Download the Daily Check-In tool for free today!
4. Teach problem-solving skills - Critical problem-solving skills promote healthy emotional resilience for children facing complex challenges. Teach problem-solving skills by brainstorming and weighing options with students when they face tough times.
As you engage in problem-solving, you show each child they have social support, boosting self-esteem and confidence. As children get older, try encouraging greater self-reliance on previous problem-solving techniques to reinforce proactive resilience strategies.
5. Help them label their emotions - Adolescents can experience a flood of emotions during stressful events. To support stress resilience, help students label their emotions and remind them that even bad feelings are completely normal and will pass in time.
Educate students to recognize and understand each emotion, its meaning, and how to categorize it. This interaction with feelings forges the ability to regulate and prevent emotions from becoming overwhelming.
Interacting with emotions is one of the best ways to explore and label them. Download Friendzy’s free Daily Check-In tool to help teach your students how to recognize the emotions they feel.
6. Demonstrate coping skills - Emotional turmoil represents an internal conflict of emotions, which can be alleviated through outward actions, reducing overall stress. In order for students to engage in stress-reducing activities, you have to teach coping strategies.
Healthy coping strategies include taking deep breaths, stretching, exercising, and meditating. These coping skills help students remain calm when they experience stress or frustration, allowing them to view situations clearly.
Need to brush up on your own coping skills? Friendzy’s evidence-based professional development resources support building the robust knowledge educators need to demonstrate the most effective coping skills. Schedule a free demo today to experience Friendzy’s extensive programs!
7. Help them not to be afraid of making mistakes - Fear of failure leads to anxiety; anxiety leads to the dark side. You can help students to channel the force by teaching them not to fear mistakes. Teaching students to embrace mistakes and learning from them creates a growth mindset.
Discuss making mistakes and how to bounce back from them with classroom lessons from Friendzy. Through these lessons, you can demonstrate that though mistakes will happen, we can always recover and learn from them. Resilience today leads to greater success tomorrow!
8. Show them the bright side through positive thinking - Positivity and gratitude reduce negative emotions, creating a greater capacity for resilience. Teach your children to think positively by encouraging them to reflect on each day's positives, utilize gratitude journals, and engage in nurturing self-care.
Teachers and parents can foster gratitude and a positive outlook by downloading these free resources from Friendzy. Each activity promotes gratitude and serves as a valuable means of cultivating positivity throughout the year.
9. Model resiliency - Children are like parrots. They imitate various behaviors, from those modeled by family members to those portrayed on television. Therefore, an environment that lacks resilience will reflect in the children living in it. This means modeling resiliency is crucial component in teaching students resilience.
Practice being emotionally resilient by modeling healthy coping mechanisms, labeling your feelings, and remaining positive during stressful situations. These activities also show students appropriate responses, setting the standard for their behavior.
Take bouncing back to a whole new level with Friendzy’s emotional resilience bounce-back bundle for educators. We packed this bundle with actionable information, activities, and strategies for teaching your K-8 students to bounce back from tough times.
10. Get outside - The best advice anyone can give to prevent stress disorders, anxiety, and depression while enhancing mental health is to spend time outdoors. Even during the pandemic, health officials encouraged people to go outside and breathe fresh air to promote mental and physical well-being.
Getting outside exposes children to sunlight, which activates vitamin D, an essential chemical for mood stabilization. Fresh air also stimulates stress-relieving hormones, and physical activity, such as sports, produces endorphins, reduces cortisol, and provides a healthy outlet for negative emotions.
Help Your Students Build Emotional Resilience with Friendzy
Building emotional resilience can be achieved through a synthesis of social support, positive psychology, and healthy activity. Children who learn emotional resilience are far better off than their non-resilient peers, and resilient children grow up to be successful, resilient adults.
Through several easy-to-implement strategies, you can help your students develop strong emotional resilience in the face of stressful and traumatic events.
You don’t have to go it alone. With Friendzy’s social-emotional character development program, your school can support students’ emotional resilience with tools and techniques they’ll use for life. Try a free demo today to see how you can make a difference!