Resilience ("Ordinary Magic") in School-Aged Children

School is an extremely important part of a child’s development. School is a place to learn various academic skills, learn socialization with other children and various adults, and learn how to live and adapt in a cooperative community.

During the disruptions of schooling, such as remote learning or hybrid approaches or return to school with masks and other protections, a variety of emotions are easily stirred. This very tumultuous period can provoke a variety of both positive and negative emotions. When children are home, they may feel good about being with their parents. When in school, they are happy to regain in-person interaction with their friends and teachers.

Our job, as parents, teachers, and other grown-ups who work with children, is to help children cope and master negative emotions in order to make their adaptation to this confusing period of time more successful—as well as modulating positive emotions, so they do not overwhelm the child.

Positive emotions include excitement when at school, seeing their school building and their classroom, physically reuniting with friends, meeting with new friends, and engaging and re-engaging with teachers and other adults.

Most importantly, there are potential negative emotions as a result of stressful events. There may be anxiety and worry or sadness and anger.

Examples of anxiety may manifest in comments such as the following: ”I am going to get sick from coronavirus”; “I am worried about my parent(s)”; “The other kids are going to make me sick”; “I am going to make the other kids sick”; “My teacher/other staff are going to make me sick”; “I am going to make the grown-ups sick at home or at school”; “I did not wash my hands enough”; “I did not Purell enough.”

Examples of sadness and anger are: “Why is it happening to me”; “I miss all the time that I spent with my parent(s) at home”; “It’s no fun to wear a mask—it hurts”; “Washing my hands so much makes them hurt”; “The Purell burns my hands”; “I wish I could be together with all the other kids”; “It makes me sad that I can only be with my pod; the other pods have more fun kids”; “My favorite teacher is in another pod.”

If children have difficulty mastering or coping with these and other negative emotions, they may develop a variety of behaviors, such as disruptions at one extreme and withdrawal at the other extreme. The major goal for all adults working with children is to promote resilience in the children so they can cope most effectively with their stressed-induced emotions.

What Is Resilience?

Resilience has been called “ordinary magic” (Masten, 2001). It is the ability of an adult or a child to adapt to various stresses in their life. Stressors (such as the COVID-19 crisis or becoming involved with a complicated school schedule) potentially lead to negative emotions. By helping the child deal with negative emotions, we will promote the child’s resilience.

There are several general approaches that can help children, including the presence of caring relationships with parents, caregivers, family members, friends, and school staff. Children can be helped by promoting involvement in activities, minimizing their exposure to stressful events, and most importantly, the presence of adults who have a positive and calm attitude.

Two Emotion Regulation Techniques

• Explicit emotion regulation
• Implicit emotion regulation

Explicit emotion regulation includes conscious techniques, such as:

1. Authoritative (not authoritarian) parenting or teaching: that is, communicating that the adults know how to solve the situation at hand
2. Reappraisal: Re-evaluating the situation. Look at how we can make this situation fun. We are a group working together; we know how to work out a difficult situation. We will make sure that in our pod, we know how to help each other.
3. Suppression: Keep the bad feelings out of your mind; think of good feelings.

An authoritative adult who is supportive is always helpful. Whenever possible, reappraisal is more effective than the suppression of feelings. In other words, figuring out how to make the best of a difficult situation, rather than not allowing any expression of emotion.

Implicit emotion regulation is defined as “any process that operates without the need for conscious supervision or explicit intentions, and which is aimed at modifying the quality, intensity, or duration of an emotional response” (Koole, et al., 2015).

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The key to promoting psychological health and resilience in children is through understanding and promoting more adaptive automatic affective processing. In other words, the goal is to help children master whatever negative emotions they may experience.

Two general approaches: Monitoring the child’s reactions, support when the child is obviously upset. Learn what events trigger disruption.

Promote the child’s play and activities. (Children play out what troubles them, and they experiment with potential solutions through play.)

Promote the child’s verbalization: Help children to verbalize what they feel instead of acting upon it; they develop mastery over their feelings, and this mastery leads to a feeling of greater security.

The Adult Has to Master Their Own Emotional Responses

It is always difficult to reflect on the child as a whole person when he/she provokes great frustration in the adult. The child needs to feel that others do not see them exclusively through the prism of difficulties: For example, try not to harp on the child’s symptoms or misbehaviors; look for and reward (compliment) the child for those things he or she does well.

Here is a common example that illustrates the challenges for an adult when a child does not express his or her emotions directly with or without disruption.

A child may mope in an exaggerated way or will act annoyed in a disruptive way when a parent pays attention to a sibling or if a teacher pays attention to another student. The adult usually has to care for the other child while at the same time recognizing that.

It is crucial to try to pay attention to the unspoken needs of the child who has an exaggerated response to attention being given to someone else.

Think about the child’s internal experience: He or she may imagine that the adult cares about the other child and not about him or her. He or she may not realize that the adult is trying to be fair.

In other words, when a child acts inappropriately, the adult understands that all behavior has meaning. If the adult understands the child as well as him or herself, dealing with the child’s behavior can be more effective (we have the most trouble addressing behavior when we do not understand).

Observing and thinking about potential triggers for a child’s symptomatic behavior is vital. Ask what, where, when, why questions about problems (observe the non-verbal and verbal responses).

What If This Doesn't Work?

1. Expect these techniques to take time to work.
2. Adults and kids are not perfect.
3. Everyone will make mistakes.
4. We all need to be flexible and forgive ourselves and our kids.