9 Ways to a Resilient Child Course

Raising kids who’ll bounce back from adversity and challenging times

Welcome to 9 Ways to a Resilient Child – the companion program that accompanies my book of the same name. This program is a simple and practical summary version of 9 Ways to a Resilient Child, designed for those who don’t like to read, but do like activities and the practical aspects of learning.

Resilience is that thing that we all want our children to have so that when hard times hit – as they inevitably will, regardless of the efforts we make to make it otherwise – our children are able to adapt and flourish anyway.

In the 9 Ways to a Resilient Child book, I describe a handful of myths about resilience and point out things that we can and should avoid if we want to give our children a solid start in living a wonderfully resilient life. In this program, we’ll sidestep those things to avoid, and instead, we’ll focus on the critical things we can do ourselves, and the mindset we want to build in ourselves, our children – our whole family – to make resilience the default response.

Parents are constantly worried about whether their children are resilient or not. I’m asked questions like:

• Why does my first-grader cry so often?
• Why does my 8 year-old want to quit every sport we try her in?
• Why is my son so frail when friendships falter? Why does he let others push him around?
• Why does my daughter want to give up every time an exam is upon us? Or when she gets a result that isn’t perfect?

When our kids seem hopeless, or helpless, we worry about how to build more resilience. After all, kids who are resilient seem to do better – they have good relationships, do well at school, and they have high levels of wellbeing. They adapt. They get on with things. They may have setbacks and struggles – they feel down like everyone – but then… they get back up and try again.

Over the next 9 weeks we’re going to talk about 9 principles that researchers have shown can make an impact on the degree to which your child is resilient. You’ll get worksheets as pdfs over the next 9 weeks to guide your learning, and a handful of activities or suggested conversations (lots of conversations!) to have with your children so that we can start to shift their resilience in a positive direction.

A quick note: some of the activities are lots of fun and very easy. But some are tough. Really tough. They require us to think seriously and deeply about what we are trying to teach our children. And they’ll teach us a lot about ourselves. I encourage you to work through them at a pace that suits you.

And while I can’t guarantee you’ll have a more resilient child in such a short period of time, you’ll have a new set of skills and a new way of thinking that can – and will – help your child – and perhaps even you – become more resilient.

Enjoy the program!

Access your modules in the course content section below…