resilience: 4 Articles

Building a Resilient Child: Promoting Independence and Resilience During COVID-19

Helping your child develop independence and resilience is a big challenge in the best of times. During the COVID-19 pandemic, anxiety, isolation, and disrupted schedules make it harder. Dr. Julia Martin Burch shares insights and tips to help you build a resilient child, even during COVID-19. Childhood is full of challenges, from learning to be a student to managing disappointments to resolving conflict with friends. As parents or caregivers, you are charged with the difficult task of supporting and guiding your child through challenges, while also stepping back and allowing them to learn new skills and handle problems with an age-appropriate level of independence. It can be very difficult to strike this balance because your natural instinct is to step in when your child struggles. This instinct is only heightened during the current pandemic as you likely want to do whatever you can to make your child’s life a little easier during this difficult time. Yet, children only become confident in their own abilities to handle challenges by doing so themselves. When you fix a child’s difficulty for them, the child is deprived of the opportunity to learn to cope with uncomfortable emotions, creatively tackle problems, and deal with natural consequences when they occur. In fact, the current pandemic is actually an ideal time to allow your child to start tackling challenges more independently. This is because independent problem solving also gives children a sense of ownership and agency; qualities which are in very short supplies in kids’ lives these days. Whether your child has returned to in-school instruction and some extracurricular activities, or if they are still learning and interacting virtually, building these skills is empowering.   All this being said - it's also important to maintain perspective on this moment in time. Parenting at baseline is hard work. Parenting during a pandemic can feel impossible! When thinking about how to incorporate the following tips into your parenting, gauge your own stress level as well as your child’s. If you do not have the bandwidth to try these tips now, consider re-reading this in a few months.   Check in with yourself Ask yourself how often and at what times you currently intervene on your child’s behalf. Is there anywhere you can give your child more autonomy to make mistakes and muddle through challenges in the service of learning and developing new skills? If you keep intervening as you do now for the foreseeable future, will your child be ready to independently handle challenges in high school and college? Take a hard look at the current level of support you offer and where it might be hindering your child’s growth and independence.  Set goals Identify one or two initial areas to focus on. These will look different depending on your child’s age and your current level of involvement. For example, with a younger child you might slowly reduce the level of support and problem solving you provide around preparing lunch each day during breaks in virtual school. With an older

Read More
Building a Resilient Child: Promoting Independence and Resilience During COVID-19 2021-03-22T17:34:16-04:00

Hidden Joys in a Pandemic: When Readers Took to YouTube to Share My Book, The Hugging Tree

One of the great joys of a children’s book is that it lives on for a very long time. Children renew the world for us all, and as each fresh year arrives there is another throng of children snuggled in a parent’s lap or their own bed, or listening intently to a librarian or schoolteacher turning the pages of a picture or chapter book and reading aloud. Right now, a child somewhere is meeting, for the first time, The Cat in the Hat or Alice in Wonderland or Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. And as a children’s author, nothing is more inspiring than contemplating kids around the world newly enjoying a book I wrote, especially one brought to life by lovely illustrations. As an author, most of the time, I don’t get to participate in the joy of children experiencing my book. That remains a mystery. So it was a huge surprise and thrill when I discovered in late May, that the COVID-19 pandemic, with its global school closures and sheltering at home, had inspired librarians, principals, ministers and schoolteachers to take to YouTube offering read-alouds of their favorite books, including mine. My most recent picture book for Magination Press, The Hugging Tree, was published in 2016, but from March to May of this year, it was read aloud here and abroad online by two dozen individuals—schoolteachers, principals, even a Unitarian minister. All ages chimed in, from schoolchildren reading together to a cheerful pastor with a bushy white beard. Some read by the ocean, others read with their favorite companion pet, such as a guinea pig named Mocha. I do not personally know any of the people who chose to share my book. But I know why they chose it: the book is a story about resilience, about bouncing back from adversity. The story follows a tree that begins as a seed blown onto a rocky cliff, where it tries to grow with very little soil and no greenery. The tree befriends the ocean, moon, sun and birds, surviving loneliness, harsh storms and a freezing winter. With its boughs broken, and its future uncertain, the tree is saved by a boy who visits it each day, bringing soil and flowers and water. The tree grows broad and green and tall and can shelter all the people who come each day to visit. The message: you’ll make it through tough times, if you reach out to others for help, and if you let the helpers reach out to you. It’s a message that seems to be resonating this year. Each reader had their own special take on the book. Nicole Reardon, a classroom teacher in Queensland, Australia, and mother of two young children, read beautifully with an almost theatrical cadence, and whoever filmed her reading at home in her living room offered close-ups of the memorable art by noted illustrator Nicole Wong. Nicole’s video aired on May 1 and she concluded, “Right now in our own lives it might feel

Read More
Hidden Joys in a Pandemic: When Readers Took to YouTube to Share My Book, The Hugging Tree 2020-06-15T21:23:25-04:00

The Hugging Tree

Storms will come and storms will go... Sometimes the world can be a hard place to be. Have you ever felt like your life was a storm? Like you were being blown around by the wind and rain? And how did you feel after the tough time? Maybe like the sun came out and warmed you up? The Hugging Tree is a story about a tree that grows on a cliff near the ocean. The little tree struggles through wind, waves, and winter, but manages to make it through and grow big and strong. Hear Nicole Reardon read this Magination Press book about resilience aloud. Download the teacher's guide for The Hugging Tree here.

Read More
The Hugging Tree 2020-05-30T09:53:00-04:00