Discover: What is Resilience?

As parents, we want our children to grow up happy, healthy and successful. However, today’s youth are experiencing many challenges that may interfere with those goals.

Resilience is the ability to ‘bounce back’ and recover from these obstacles.

Let’s take a look at three ingredients of resilience by addressing three common beliefs about it:

Common Belief

A New Perspective

Resilience is a personality trait that some people just ‘have.’

Just as we grow and develop in other areas of our lives, we should view resilience as a set of skills that can be improved with practice.

Resilience is about avoiding negative feelings.

Resilience promotes positive thinking, but also involves recognizing negative feelings and working to limit their impact.

Resilience is about being tough and going it alone.

Although some of these skills are personal, research shows that supportive relationships are key.

The three important ingredients of resilience are social and emotional skills, positive thinking, and supportive relationships. You and your child can work together to build all three of these parts.

Your child can:

  • Develop social and emotional skills to understand and manage their feelings, develop empathy, maintain healthy relationships and make informed decisions.
  • Develop the ability to reflect on the positive despite the brain’s tendency to focus on the negative. Especially now, young people often see negativity in the news, social media and the community at large.

You and your family can:

  • Provide a supportive home life with clear rules and routines, positive expectations and opportunities for empowerment and growth.
  • Provide role modeling and practice of social-emotional skills.
  • Share your positive beliefs, values and attitudes from family culture and life experience. 

Resilience Resources

Me & My Emotions Links to an external site. is a website for young people ages 13 and up that helps them build their resilience skills through a series of lessons and activities. By watching engaging videos, playing mini-games, journaling, and having discussions with family members, your child will learn to recognize their feelings and emotions, build their empathy, and reach out for help when they are feeling overwhelmed.

Understood.org Links to an external site. has a helpful collection of articles related to building resilience, developing “growth mindset” (the belief that abilities can improve over time), identifying a child’s strengths, and how to deal with “negative self-talk” (when kids say bad things about themselves).

The RESET Toolbox is a collection of online activities and lessons focused on building resilience in young people. Supported by Western Youth Services and the Orange County Health Care Agency, the Orange County Department of Education has developed two courses for parents and families on Stress and Health and Building Blocks of Resiliency: Helping Students Thrive. These courses go into more detail about how to support your child through the challenges they may be facing.