Reviews Elsewhere – Capable: How to Teach Your Kids the Strengths, Skills, and Strategies to Build Resilience
In this interview with the authors, Sissy Goff and David Thomas, they make it clear that one of the larger issues with young people and anxiety is a lack of resilience, not the kind that we talk about here often- being resilient in the face of traumatic events, but the everyday ability to fail at something and come back from it.
How to Raise Kids Who Feel Capable in the World
There’s incredible value in sharing our experiences with our kids. It shows that we are going to fail at different things, we aren’t going to have everything figured out, and we are going to feel overwhelmed.
That quote hit home for me. I’ve written before about how little confidence I had growing up with the trauma I was dealing with. This often left me feeling overwhelmed when things didn’t go exactly right because I didn’t know how to cope. But it wasn’t the times when I tried something and it was great that truly helped me grow past my anxiety; it was the times when things went horribly wrong, and I didn’t die from it, that increased my confidence.
The fear had almost always been about something bad happening and never being able to recover, but every time things went poorly and I simply moved on and tried again, I grew in confidence. I started living that meme that I’m sure many of us have seen about people liking us:
Resilience comes from the confidence that, even if things go horribly wrong, you’ll still be here, moving on. What I think young people are missing today is examples of that. One, because we don’t like to talk about the 100 times we struggled with something before figuring it out, but also because we live in a society that mocks people who try and fail at anything. When we go online, how often do we see the perfect finished product rather than the failures someone lived through to get there? And, even if someone shows the failures, how often is the comments section filled with mockery?
It’s no wonder the thing young adults struggle with more than anything is perfectionism. We’ve created a world that expects it.
