The times they are a-changin’, and it’s impossible to predict with any degree of certainty where our emerging technologies, our labor market, and our society will be in five years, much less ten or more years. Prognosticators offer wildly divergent views of the future, and it’s hard to know whose imagined future we will be living in. Given this context, guiding our children, which was never easy, has become increasingly challenging. What worked for us, the secret to our success, and the path we followed might be less helpful for our children. They may need different skills and approaches to thrive in the coming age. One attribute that is poised to pay great dividends in a world changing this quickly is the ability to adapt to new conditions.
Why Today’s Students Need More Than a Plan
While having a plan is certainly beneficial when a student sets out on an academic or career path, the ability to alter that plan and make adjustments is even more important. Given how many variables are in flux, long-term planning is simply more challenging today than it was for prior generations. Students need to have a direction, but they will need to reassess their progress on any given path regularly.
The challenges students are facing right now
Every generation has its unique challenges and opportunities. Today’s students are navigating a competitive academic environment, a shifting social and technological space, and a planet that is clearly in transition.
Academics
While students in previous generations had an easier time predicting admissions outcomes and could forecast with greater certainty where their grades and scores might take them, today’s students don’t have that luxury. When admission rates are in the low single digits for the most selective schools or academic programs, students need to have a plan A, B, and C. Flexibility and the ability to pivot to new pathways are essential when outcomes are this uncertain.
Social challenges
Our technologies have impacted our connections to and relationships with one another. Screen-mediated interactions have replaced many in-person interactions, our social media networks have intensified social comparisons, while our new chatbots offer a simulacrum of human connection. While we may be more “connected” virtually, young people today report feeling greater levels of loneliness, anxiety, and depression. Students need strategies to remain resilient and emotionally healthy when our technologies come up short.
Rapidly changing technology
The furious pace of technological advancement is already impacting career prospects. A generation of young people was advised that the ability to write computer code was going to be an essential and highly marketable skill, but developments in Artificial Intelligence have fundamentally devalued that skill. One of the frontier AI models can now recreate a year’s worth of code in an hour, leaving many diligent CS students struggling to launch their careers. The tools being developed by the frontier AI models are poised to impact careers in the legal profession, the fields of management consulting, medicine, translation, therapy, and many others. Given these developments, increasing one’s tolerance for uncertainty and one’s ability to adapt are key skills for this generation.
The Foundations of Student Resilience
Students in this generation are in critical need of resilience: the capacity to adapt, recover, and self-regulate in the face of stresses and setbacks. Resilience has been explored in many contexts by psychologists and neuroscientists, and it predicts many positive life outcomes. We will all face stressors, setbacks, and disappointments, and this generation of students, in particular, will face many novel challenges. When stressors and setbacks hit, there are many ways to respond. Those with greater resilience can shift gears, emotionally regulate, tamp down the activation of the amygdala, and activate the problem-solving centers of the prefrontal cortex. At some point, we are all going to get knocked down. How quickly we recover and reorient ourselves will have a great impact on the quality of our lives and our experience.
How to cultivate resilience
Resilience has its roots in one’s family of origin and can be enhanced, scaffolded, and developed throughout life. It begins with our early childhood experiences, particularly our early challenges and setbacks. While too many adverse childhood experiences or traumas can weaken our ability to adapt and respond to challenges in a healthy way, we need adequate opportunities to utilize our problem-solving skills, to fail and recover, to flex our self-regulatory skills to wire our brain for resilience. Self-efficacy, our belief in our ability to accomplish tasks, is built through our mastery experiences, through overcoming challenges, much more than through people telling us that we are capable or competent. We believe our own felt-experience more than the affirming words of others.
Researchers have identified several factors that contribute to resilience:
Human Connection and Secure Relationships
Consistent, supportive, reliable relationships with family, mentors, teachers, teammates, and friends help scaffold our resilience. When we fall and we can lean on members of our “team” who show up with support and encouragement, we learn that we are not alone in our struggles. Feeling seen, validated, and supported helps us recover more quickly.
Self-Regulation Skills
The ability to manage intense and complex emotions is a skill that can be learned and cultivated. What do I do with my big feelings? Our small children naturally lack these skills, and that’s why adults have to step in to help calm our little ones and teach them how to regulate their own inner states. But when parents step back, our kids will eventually find their own strategies, frequently those that have been modeled by adults and peers. Individuals who can manage and process their hurt, disappointment, anger, and loss in a healthy way will be able to reclaim their center and move forward more quickly.
A Sense of Agency
Those who are taught to believe in their own ability to effect change, to have an internal locus of control rather than being a passive actor in a world of great external forces, will be able to recover and pivot more effectively following a setback. What’s the next right step I can take to improve my situation? Those with this mindset have a clear advantage when setbacks occur.
Help-Seeking Skills
Those with the humility to recruit support, to use others as a sounding board, to gain information and insights through a network of friends and family will do better and recover faster.
Cognitive Flexibility
Rigid, black-and-white thinkers are less resilient than those who can see things from a multiplicity of perspectives. Those who can look at a problem from different angles will come up with novel solutions.
A Sense of Meaning and Purpose
People who have a “why”, a sense of purpose, are more likely to reorient and pivot if one pathway forward fails to materialize. Those with a “why” can handle some discomfort, some short-term pain, in the service of a long-term goal, vision, or purpose.
Physical Health and Stability
Dealing with a setback or a loss can certainly deplete one’s energy stores. Those who have a solid foundation in nutrition, sleep, and self-care will be able to sustain more short-term stresses without collapsing. Taking care of the body helps support the mind and emotions and provides energy to move forward.
How parents can help raise more resilient students
Parents can support their kids in developing resilience. This requires a balance of validating, modeling, nurturing, and stepping back when appropriate. Here are ten ways parents can help build more resilient kids:
- Teach your kids your own self-care and centering techniques: When you get knocked off your center, how do you reclaim it? How do you grow yourself back up? Let your kids in on your secrets. Do you walk in nature, meditate, yell into pillows, write a letter you never send, hit a punching bag, exercise, take a hot bath, listen to a certain piece of music, or talk to a friend? Share your strategies. And share how you arrived at them. We’re always experimenting and learning.
- Help your students brainstorm a post-school reset routine: Talk to your kids about what they need to shift gears after school. What is the best way for them to unwind in a healthy way and then transition to the next phase of their day? Some kids need to clear their heads, play music, and turn off their brains for 30 minutes. Some might prefer taking a walk without distractions. Others need to shoot hoops, move their bodies, and press reset. This simple act of reflection helps get students thinking about their own needs and self-care routines.
- Deeply listen and validate your kids when they are upset: Psychologist Marsha Linehan put it well when she emphasized that caring adults must “validate what is valid.” People’s feelings are valid. We are entitled to them. You don’t have to validate what is invalid or patently wrong. But you can acknowledge feelings and provide support and comfort. Eventually, your kids can learn to internalize that wise, nurturing adult presence and access it later in life when they face a setback.
- Model cognitive flexibility, inquiry, and contingency planning: Help your kids reframe problems and setbacks: Is there a different way to see this or a different interpretation? Ask good questions to stimulate problem-solving: What might help this situation? Help them think through contingencies and see that there is more than one good outcome in most situations: We will shoot for A, but may pivot to B or C. We can do this in a low-stakes way when planning for a trip, movie night, or dinner out. Model that pivoting is healthy, and acknowledge that there are many potential good outcomes.
- Celebrate persistence and creativity: Take a page from psychologist Carol Dweck and draw attention to when your kids are being persistent and using creative problem-solving. Focus on the process more than the outcome, particularly if you see your kid persisting through frustration and staying on task.
- Help build stress tolerance: Students need practice overcoming hard things. Angela Duckworth explored this principle in her book, GRIT, where she espoused the value of taking on challenging projects over a long period of time. The ability to handle stress and discomfort in manageable doses leads to the development of a greater stress tolerance for the future. Parents can encourage their children to take on and stick with challenging projects. When students know that they can embrace challenges and persist through difficulties, this becomes an inner resource for the future.
- Allow your kids the gift of frustration: Allow kids a chance to struggle. Be careful about swooping in to save them from a challenging situation, especially if the stakes are low. Recovering from mistakes is critical, and students must be allowed to make their own mistakes and recover from them to build resilience.
- Normalize setbacks and failure: Share your mistakes with your kids. Let them know that you are fallible and mistakes are healthy. Perfectionism is brittle and weakens us. Small mistakes are part of life, make us human, and help us grow. There is something to the Silicon Valley ethos where failure is simply part of the iterative process of creating something new. And the key to processing failure is the reflection afterwards: What did you learn? What will you do differently next time? What resources might have helped you?
- Normalize uncertainty without catastrophizing it: Kids are always looking to us to interpret things: In this moment, should I be scared? Am I safe? Is this okay? We can pay attention to our language and how we frame things for our kids. If we present the future as a scary place, our kids may internalize that. Dwelling in a place of fear is antithetical to resilience. Shift the focus to the things that are in our power rather than to areas where we are powerless.
- Be the non-anxious presence or the less-anxious presence: When things go wrong, the more you can stay centered and focused on problem-solving, the more you can teach your kids how to respond to stressful situations. Edwin Friedman’s concept of the non-anxious presence carries deep resonance and can enhance resilience in our kids.
Conclusion
Raising resilient children in an uncertain world means consistently providing a secure base from which they can explore, take on challenges, fail, reflect, and try again. There is so much that remains unknown about our future. The world is changing so quickly, it’s vertiginous. We cannot change the pace of technology or the political climate, but we can focus on giving our kids a sense of agency, a sense of trust in themselves to solve problems, adapt to changing conditions, get help when needed, and take self-care very seriously. We can give our kids a loving, supportive foundation that will set them up with tools and a mindset conducive to thriving in these uncertain times.
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