Building Resilience

Cindy Lopez:
Welcome. My name is Cindy Lopez, the host of this CHC podcast, Voices of Compassion. We hope you find a little courage, feel connected and experience compassion every time you listen.

Resilience. Why is it that some people are more resilient than others? One of the most important things we can do for our children is to help them develop resilience, and the good news is that resilience can be learned at any age. Learning to cope with failure and mistakes is part of the necessary process of developing resilience. And as parents, it’s important to let our kids make mistakes and be there on the sidelines to encourage them without fixing them. Listen to our conversation today with CHC experts, Dr. Patty Crisostomo, clinical program manager and psychologist, and Sarah Taylor, doctoral psychology intern about the importance of resilience and how you can help your child develop these all needed skills.

Welcome Patty and Sarah.

Dr. Patty Crisostomo:
Hey, Cindy.

Sarah Taylor:
Hi, Cindy.

Cindy Lopez:
We’re so glad that you’re here with us today, and this topic is really an important one as we talk about resilience and how to build resilience in our kids and in ourselves really. Yesterday I was just working on something as I was thinking about ADHD and strengths and just a big part of resilience is knowing yourself, like some self-awareness so that you know what triggers you in certain situations, and so I think it’s really an important topic and timely.

Let’s talk about resilience and what it is. So is it a learned skill or is it something you’re born with?

Sarah Taylor:
I think there are certain people who might be born with certain traits that are more adaptive or might be effective in certain settings and there are also different life experiences we can have that can affect our resilience.

Dr. Patty Crisostomo:
I think about resilience as more of just a process, kind of this like ongoing journey, right? So it’s the process of adapting and adjusting well in the face of stress or adversity or tragedy or any other kind of really challenging environmental experience that we’re having.

Dr. Patty Crisostomo:
I think there are a lot of misconceptions about resilience. Like, that you’re either born with it or you aren’t, you’re either resilient or you’re not, and it really isn’t this kind of zero one binary thing. I think resilience is dependent on the different pathways or trajectories that people follow as well as their own different individual characteristics or traits.

Cindy Lopez:
So what if a child doesn’t really build many of those skills during childhood? Like they don’t really get the opportunity to build resilient skills for whatever reason, right? Sometimes I think parents protect their kids from struggles, rightly so I get it like they protect their kids from struggling or from pain or making mistakes, so they may not have built some of those skills up in terms of resilience. So can those skills be learned at any age?

Sarah Taylor:
I think an important thing to think about with resilience is that it’s not necessarily something that’s special or rare or something that only a certain population could possibly acquire if they have like a special key to the kingdom, but rather it’s a process that is actually quite ordinary, and it’s a process that humans in general are able to adapt using all of the human resources that we are born with, and so I think this idea of, oh, what if I haven’t given them this special token that will make them resilient can sometimes be disheartening for parents to hear as opposed to this idea that this is actually an ordinary process, like most people are resilient and it kind of gives us a more optimistic viewpoint of what resilience is and how we can approach it.

Cindy Lopez:
Yeah, I wonder what it looks like at different ages. Can you talk about that a little bit?

Dr. Patty Crisostomo:
Yeah, you know, I think about just what the developmental expectations are in like psychologists or therapists speak. It’s, you know, what are the developmental tasks across different stages and when we think about that it’s considering what are the set of skills that are needed for a youth? What available resources do they have at that time and then what environmental input or what have they learned? What have they been exposed to? And so if we kind of think about what are the developmental tasks for like an infant or a young child, so someone under the age of five it’s really important that they’re learning kind of basic gross motor, um, developing fine motor skills. They’re learning to talk, they’re learning to form relationships, right? And then in middle childhood they’re focusing more on learning academic skills, like learning to read and do basic math, and then adolescence it’s all about, you know, establishing more emotional independence and then, you know, it goes onward, with like early adulthood and middle-aged and older adults and so, you know, I think with resilience it’s always in the context of like what is kind of typically expected at that age for most people in that culture.

Cindy Lopez:
So as you think about resilience and building resilience in kids, I’m wondering, just generally are there ways or things that parents or caregivers or teachers can support students or children as they’re growing to develop greater resilience?

Sarah Taylor:
I think one of the things that we know is that a really key piece for children is that the families are able to maintain the same routines, regulatory roles, even in times when things might be much more chaotic or difficult. And in fact, especially during those times because those really like everyday ordinary routines of family life can be reassuring, calming to the child, and I think also the research shows that, you know, when children have that sort of safe, secure base, we do see like greater resilience patterns.

Dr. Patty Crisostomo:
I think that to your point, Sarah, you know, that sense of like structure and predictability promotes for kids and teens just a sense of control, and they are kind of able to predict like what may happen, and that ability to have that agency or to be able to interact with friends or go to school or to, you know, be with family members who are consistent and caring can allow kids to just feel more confident and connected and have that sense of both physical as well as psychological or emotional safety and security.

Cindy Lopez:
Yeah, I’m wondering about children, students, who have experienced significant adversity and at CHC we see families and kids who sometimes are in the middle of trauma. In addition to that, we see kids who could be struggling with learning challenges or with some developmental challenges. They don’t travel along that typical trajectory. What about those kids? Is it different for them in terms of developing resilience? Is it harder? Do they need more experience with certain aspects of life?

Sarah Taylor:
I was just gonna say, I think a lot of the resilience literature actually comes out of really devastating circumstances or really difficult things that have happened to children and adolescents, and that is actually where we’re seeing a lot of the ability of these kids and adolescents to be resilient. So all the tools that we’re talking about today, I think are absolutely applicable even to kids who might have had more significant trauma than a typical child might.

Dr. Patty Crisostomo:
You know, I think about resilience as not necessarily like an absolute right that the tools and the strategies that Sarah and I are talking about, I kind of think about it like a bank account, right? We may not necessarily have control over our initial like starting account value because for example, we know that certain social factors like experiencing discrimination or having a particular socioeconomic status or belonging to a particular race or ethnicity can predict unfortunately how resilient one can be. However, we can engage in coping strategies that actually continue to promote stronger mental and physical health so that we don’t quote unquote, “go broke when we do encounter stress.”

So, we also know that resilience can be renewable. So even if the usual stressors of life are happening for us, and then something even more unexpected for which we don’t have control over…so, for example, hmm like the COVID pandemic. We have the capacity to keep going even when our bandwidth is low, uh, and we can do things like self-care, or some of the other strategies that Sarah and I will talk about to kind of refill up that bank account. And it’s always important to kind of keep a reserve in case something goes wrong, right? So like making sure to have a bit of that buffer in terms of like just accumulating positive experiences or making sure that we are building mastery, and I can talk a little bit more about what that means um can be really powerful in allowing us to ride through stress because stress is also on a continuum, right? Like not all stress is bad. Stress actually can be really healthy and positive because it helps our bodies to just prepare us for the temporary challenges that we have in life. So, for example, like making sure that we’re on time to this podcast recording and, uh, you know, once we’re here, like our stress level will, you know, re-acclimate and go back down and so that is an example of tolerable stress.

Sarah Taylor:
This is kind of like a quadratic curve, right? Like we know that kids who have some challenge and some exposure to adverse experiences actually do better, and at the same time we also don’t see that like children who have excessive or prolonged or extreme adverse experiences are, you know, more resilient, of course. But there are many studies that have shown that, for example, like kids who were in the pediatric intensive care unit actaully reported having something called post-traumatic growth, which is like they had even more resilience after undergoing a challenge, and I think that’s an important idea to have in mind as well. I think we’ve also looked at this idea of a little bit of challenge and stress is actually adaptive across different animal populations, and I think all of it has really come to a similar conclusion.

Dr. Patty Crisostomo:
Yeah, stressful events can be painful, and they don’t necessarily determine just the outcome of our life. We actually do experience growth when we’re able to effectively make it through those challenges. And we can come away feeling more confident, feeling more empowered, feeling like we have the ability to look back and say, “wow, I got through that really tough time” and it is still that really important balance between having a tolerable amount of stress that doesn’t exceed our ability to deal with it. And so I think to your point Cindy about what are the strategies, like, what can we do? How can we refill or um replenish our bank account? I think that’s really important for parents and caregivers to really think about because it’s not this absolute amount because life can be unpredictable.

Cindy Lopez:
It’s interesting too because we know that there’s a whole body of work around adverse child experiences or ACEs as they’re called, and we’re not necessarily getting into that for this particular episode, but that significant kind of adversity as Patty you were just saying, like the chronic toxic stuff when it exceeds our ability to deal with it, that’s where we kind of experience less than desirable outcomes.

Sarah Taylor:
I think also it’s important to think about the idea that, you know, if all three of us were to experience the exact same thing, we would not necessarily all have the same response. And so just looking at the actual experience that somebody had doesn’t necessarily tell the whole story. We know that different people are more sensitive to different life events, and I think actually when they’ve studied these we know that those that are considered more sensitive, quote unquote, “they actually have more resilience in nurturing environments and less resilience in environments that are not nurturing” and so it’s not to say that being more sensitive is good or bad, but rather that you might be more impacted by your life experiences than another person, which I think is really interesting as well because sometimes we might be thinking, “oh, well so and so went through the same thing and they didn’t feel this bad afterward.” Like, why, why would I need to get help right now? And the answer is that we’re all different in terms of the impact of experiences.

Cindy Lopez:
Yeah, that’s a good point.

Dr. Patty Crisostomo:
Yeah, it’s all about how we experience not just like what the nature of the adversity is, but it’s also really contextual, like how much agency or a sense of control does that person have both in that particular stressful experience, but also in general, like, do they already have the sense that, “hey, I have the ability to get through challenging, tricky things?”

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Cindy Lopez:
We keep alluding to strategies, so let’s talk about that. Also just the idea that there’s for our parents, even educators, teachers working with children and adolescents, we want to make sure that our children have opportunities to succeed, and we want them to be able to succeed in the face of some adversity. So it’s important to perhaps as parents or teachers, like to think intentionally about what kinds of experiences can your child have, can your students have that would build resilience? So, Patty and Sarah, what strategies, what ideas do you have for parents and educators as we talk about building resilience in kids?

Dr. Patty Crisostomo:
Yeah. I think what has been found over and over both from like a research perspective, but also clinically when we work with young people and their families or caregivers it’s just the ability to have at least just one caring person, one caring adult in their life. It doesn’t have to be a parent, doesn’t have to be a teacher. It could be a coach, it could be, you know, a babysitter, but that safe relationship for which a child is seen where there are positive interactions, where there’s attuned interactions with someone who’s trustworthy can be really, really powerful and actually be one of the core parts of treatment for people who experience more of that toxic stress that we talked about earlier. Some of the other factors around resilience, I think having the ability to soothe yourself or the ability to regulate your emotions. And we know that emotion regulation skills can absolutely be taught and learned and practiced and generalized across different situations like school and home and when you’re competing at a swim meet, right? And then support around developing some just cognitive coping tools, like being able to be flexible, and to be able to switch gears or to shift our expectations when things don’t go our way, or to be able to shift our behavior when we anticipate something to happen one way, but then it doesn’t happen that way.

Sarah Taylor:
I agree with all of that. Um, I think I turned to sort of looking at the pieces that some of the literature emphasizes more repeatedly, and I think some of the things that kept popping up when I was looking were this idea of setting positive goals and monitoring and measuring achievements and things that are going well as opposed to only monitoring problems and things that are going wrong, basically increasing this feeling of competence within a child, which makes sense, right, because that increases the likelihood of somebody being able to feel like they can handle the stressful experiences that might be happening. I think similarly, this idea of the way that we are able to parent, the way that we’re able to connect with kids can have really lasting impacts on the ability of the kids to deal with stressors as they come their way, all while saying of course this doesn’t cancel out this idea that we want to protect kids from toxic stress and long-term stress.

Dr. Patty Crisostomo:
I think they’re also individual activities or individual skills that can be helpful to learn or to acquire in order to be more resilient. Again, like just kind of thinking like, “how can I create more of this reserve, right? So doing things like making sure to accumulate just positive or pleasant experiences both in the short term, like going for a run, right, or watching your favorite TV show, or getting some new perfume or, you know, just the shorter term positive experiences, but also long term positive experiences are really important too because having a sense of just meaningful lasting memories that we can go back to like a mental vacation can be really powerful. Becoming masterful or developing skills is really important too like engaging in hobbies that you really love or doing activities that just bring you joy and things that you can improve upon. Like if learning to paint is something that you’re interested in, and then you like start taking a couple classes and you get really, really good at it, it can make us feel more self-confident. It can ensure the sense that we’re feeling capable and talented on a regular basis because when we build this mastery, it also just helps us to assume, “hey, I’ll be successful in future situations that we’re placed in.” And as kids and teens kind of grow and acquire different experiences, if we have the opportunity to be successful in a variety of situations, we’ll feel more confident, they’ll feel more confident in their ability to overcome challenges.

Sarah Taylor:
I like that you’re bringing up this idea of they need to have challenges, like that is actually a part of building up that resilience bank is having the challenges and allowing them to see, “oh, I can do this. I have the competence to do this.” I really like that.

Cindy Lopez:
I wonder if we can get to some more specific strategies by thinking about planning ahead. So kind of if then planning, so it’s talking with your child, like if this happens, then what would you do? How would you react and talking through some of that and rehearsing skills, and, identifying scenarios. And then the whole idea of self-awareness I think is pretty important too because as our kids develop greater self-awareness, they know how they’re going to respond in given situations. And so if they realize ahead of time that they’re going into a situation where it’s going to be more stressful, what coping strategies do they have? So what kinds of experiences at different ages could parents give their kids?

Dr. Patty Crisostomo:
I don’t know, Cindy, if it’s necessarily like parents creating these situations to cope because just naturally part of growing up is experiencing a bit of adversity, right, like even just learning like kind of basic self-care skills, like learning how to brush your teeth, it can be really frustrating, learning how to tie your shoes, learning how to read, learning how to share or tolerate when someone on the playground takes your stuff, right? Like, those are the kinds of adversities that naturally come up. There are some other experiences that we might be able to predict ahead of time, like, “oh, hey, I’ve got this big test coming up, mom, dad, can you help me with that?” And that’s where I think parents can be really supportive in building those resiliency skills because they can kind of help their child to really break it down by coping ahead. And it’s like coping ahead is a skill in itself cause it makes us consider how we might be prepared in some way to reduce stress ahead of time, like when we know we have to do something it’s really helpful to kind of think through like what is the starting point and what is the end goal and how are we gonna get there? What are some tricky things that might come up along the way? So the cope ahead skill is actually a specific skill in a particular kind of treatment called DBT or Dialectical Behavior Therapy, but what happens in the cope ahead skill it’s where someone can begin by just describing the situation that’s likely to cause stress or to make them feel uncomfortable, some sort of uncomfortable emotion. And then to really be specific about what the situation might be, name the emotions that might come up and then decide what you could do to cope either with the intense emotion or what problem solving skills might be helpful, and to be really, really specific and then to kind of rehearse and imagine that situation in your mind. And then imagine yourself actually participating and going through those steps and then imagine that you actually cope effectively and so it’s all about kind of this like mental preparation and practice and you know, at the end of that, after you imagine yourself coping really effectively, practicing some relaxation after the fact, relaxation, and also like self-soothing or rewarding yourself for planning.

Cindy Lopez:
For our listeners, if you have any questions or concerns about your child, please reach out to us. You can find us at chconline.org. You can reach out to our care team, careteam@chconline.org. There are free parent consultations available and more. So, please reach out to us if you know you’re concerned and your child doesn’t appear to be resilient or you know, your child’s going through experiences that are very difficult for them and you’re not sure how to support them. So Sarah, and Patty, as we wrap up this episode, I’m wondering what parting advice you might have for our listeners around this topic of building resilience?

Sarah Taylor:
My takeaway here would be that it’s more complex than whether somebody is resilient or not. There’s no single trait that somebody is born with that says, “oh, they are resilient,” or, “oh, I was able to give my child resilience,” but rather it’s this continuous adaptation that occurs in all people and depending on the experience, and also really depending on the relationships and other systems that are present in a child’s life are really gonna be what determines how resilient a child is. And so it’s sort of taking away some of that blame or idea of if we could only become resilient enough then everything would be okay as opposed to there are a lot of intersecting systems here that are going to promote resilience versus make resilience less likely of an outcome.

Dr. Patty Crisostomo:
Yeah. And if I can add to that, I think sometimes parents and caregivers feel uh just this strong sense of pressure to do this level of like protection or to make sure that they are doing everything that they need to do in order to ensure that all of these resilience factors are present for their life to set their child up for success. And you know, there’s this idea of good enough parenting, like a good enough environment, and I think to Sarah’s point that this is a multifactorial process that does involve a community that involves lots of systems like it doesn’t just fall on a parent’s responsibility to promote these resiliency factors, you know, the school environment, peer environment, you know, a young person’s own like motivation and desire for learning their own intelligence, their ability to just engage in like regular self-care skills, like just exercise and having a healthy diet, right? These are all activities um, practices that are both within an individual and also within the broader system that can combine to create a stronger kind of bandwidth to deal with tough stuff that comes up.

Sarah Taylor:
I have a quote from an article that I feel like sums that up really well, that I really liked, that says resilience does not come from rare and special qualities, but from everyday magic of ordinary, normative resources in the minds, brains, and bodies of children in their families and relationships and in their communities. It’s this idea of the magic within.

Cindy Lopez:
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