“Grit and resilience is best learned and nurtured when children go through challenging situations. Covid-19 is a challenging time. Don’t shy your child away from what is going on. Use it to build their resilience.”
During ShawsTalks, our Shaws Preschool Webinar, Liane Shaw, Director of Shaws Preschool, shared with us how we can use these challenging times during Covid to build resilience in our children.
At Shaws Preschool, we want to ensure we give the children the building blocks to become resilient individuals. This includes having a strong sense of independence, autonomy and self confidence, the ability to communicate well with others and express themselves, good problem-solving skills, being open to trying new things, and the ability to ask for help. It is a PROCESS and will take time, lots of experiences.
What we can do as parents and teachers to build children’s resilience during this time.
- Let children see and observe how you cope with challenging times.
- Give children experiences to cope with challenges – Let children develop resilience by coping with challenges. Break it down to smaller challenges so they can cope with one challenge at a time.
- Encourage healthy risk taking. Yes, this involves allowing them to take little risks, and parents stepping back and let your child work it out on their own.
- Embrace failure – We need to give children opportunities to fail. Let them feel what it is like to fail. They also need to see parents fail, and how parents see these failures as learning experiences. That failing is normal.
- Encouraging self efficacy. – Children need to learn to be independent (age appropriate). This includes doing things for themselves, including putting on their shoes etc. And this includes independent play.
- Encouraging grit and persistence – Sometimes things dont work out the way we want to. And thats ok. Then try again.
- Healthy relationships – This is the BIG! Healthy relationships help everyone overcome big things. Relationships with people. “I’m here for you!”
If you would like a copy of the webinar, contact Dana at dana@shaws.com.sg