Can Resilience Be Learned? (Spoiler alert: yes.)📄

I have the extraordinary privilege of being in private practice and teaching in Jerusalem where I work with young children and adolescents, parents and teachers, whole families and gap year students. It is from the gap year students that I am exposed to specific insights, experiences, and realities for North American Jewish adolescents inching their way toward adulthood in the early 21st century. Theirs are stories of privilege and access, of opportunity and exposure, of close families that can also be complicated, about friendships that are confusing, and about identity formation in a time of technology and rapid change. In other words, they are the typical concerns of an emerging adult in 2020. What is unusual, though, is the struggle these young people face as they manage their day-to-day lives — the inability to take charge of their own decisions, to deal with disappointment, or to navigate complexity. Seemingly slight disappointments manifest as enormous setbacks in their minds. Many are crippled by anxiety and overwhelmed by even the most mundane day-to-day activities and experiences. They lack the confidence to make decisions and take charge of their realities.

Of course these emerging adults do not deplane in Tel Aviv in September and become nervous, anxious and dependent. They board the flight shlepping around the baggage of a childhood in which they were embraced, supported and supervised to an extreme, but given so few of the tools they need to thrive on their own. Very often they don’t realize how heavy that baggage is until they get to Israel and have to carry it themselves for the first time. I (and many others) believe that the contents of that baggage are the results of themes and norms that animated their childhood and that show up in the reality of a daily existence in which young adults have been given tremendous academic and other opportunities, but have not been given the opportunity to exercise the muscle of resilience. 

The good news is that it’s not too late.

In observing the conspicuous lack of independence and resilience in our children and students, we naturally ask the question, “can resilience be taught?” While it isn’t simple, there is plenty of research to back up the idea that resilience is something that can be carefully cultivated in young people, and that with proper interventions we can see radically different adolescent outcomes.

Encouraging Mistakes

Internationally renowned educator Sir Ken Robinson, whose 2006 TED Talk is the number one TED Talk in history with more than 63 million views and counting, argues that “we’re now running national education systems where mistakes are the worst thing you can make. [But] if you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original. By the time they get to be adults, most kids have lost that capacity. They have become frightened of being wrong.” Robinson urges us to reconsider the paradigms within our classrooms, within our grading systems, within our feedback and assessment mechanisms, indeed within our comprehensive school cultures.

Colleagues Adina Glickman (Stanford University) and Abigail Lipson (Harvard University) have collaborated on launching several initiatives aimed at strengthening college students who experience crippling fear, nervousness and disappointment when faced with failure or setback. They termed these students “failure deprived.” The problem these students face is the product of a lifelong avoidance of significant failure. High academic achievement, successful navigation of social complexities and a childhood of great privilege infuse an individual’s life with accomplishment but are also typically in tandem with significant parental (over)involvement and systems that accommodate rather than challenge. This often manifests in breakdowns and “freak outs” when faced with inevitable failure and disappointment in late adolescence. To avoid this phenomenon, students ought to be allowed to fail without parental or teacher intervention so that they can experience the thought processes and skill development that arrive in the moments of “what do I do next?” The challenge is to use the creative energies of faculty members to envision a pedagogic framework in which “mistake” or “failure” is not an unavoidable, unfortunate by-product of learning, but rather an essential and integral ingredient of the learning process itself.  

Stay Out Of It

Almost exclusively coming from a place of love and support, we (as parents and teachers) have a tendency to insert ourselves into our children’s experiences, logistics and relationships, and to rob them of the opportunity to learn how to manage time, conflict and the complexities of growing up.

Distinguished psychologist Alfred Bandura famously advanced a theory of self-efficacy in which he argued that a belief in one’s abilities – not in the abilities of parents, teachers or associates – empowers an individual to complete tasks, attain goals and manage complex situations. Self efficacy is built and nurtured by the trial-and-error rhythm of appropriately messy childhood and adolescence, by the cadence of consistent commitment to problem solving. It is a belief in one’s own abilities on a very realistic level – neither overblown nor undervalued. Julie Lythcott-Haimes, former Stanford Dean of Students (and author of best-selling book, How To Raise An Adult) explains the adult struggle with allowing children to struggle by saying that, “we can’t buy resilience for them in the way we buy tutoring, coaching, test prep, and college counseling. Resilience is built from real hardship and cannot be bought or manufactured.” A critical ingredient to the formulation of self efficacy is that it can only be achieved by “doing the work” and witnessing the success that results from one’s own effort, critical thinking and skill mastery.

Imagine how the dynamic of the school-student relationship changes when the student is treated as the Chief Decision Maker regarding his commitment to academics, his understanding of the impact of his behavior, and his responsibilities to manage his own time. The typical conversation about a particular student struggle is a conversation between teacher and parent. How might the conversation, and ultimately the outcomes of that conversation, be shifted if the student is at the center of the discussion? Many children may be uncomfortable resolving an issue directly with the teacher, but it is the confrontation with discomfort itself that teaches a young person how to manage awkwardness and injustice and how to self-advocate. When a parent intervenes on the child’s behalf, the child loses an opportunity to learn those critical skills. Similarly, consider the degree to which parents and teachers coordinate play dates, suggest recess activities and manage social conflict. There are certainly elements of logistics and conflict resolution that require the input of an adult, but children are capable of managing far more than they typically do when given the chance to figure out how to do so.

Communal Responsibility

Israeli schools have come a long way from the kibbutz model of decades gone by, but remnants can be found in many corners of today’s Israeli education. One of those remnants is an expectation of communal responsibility. Of course Israeli schools employ janitorial staff, but it is very common for a specific class to be designated as responsible for stacking all of the chairs in the auditorium after a school assembly. Or for a student committee to inspect the cleanliness of the classrooms, and hold the classroom’s students accountable. Or for school-wide programs to be run almost exclusively by students…that is, elementary school students. Giving children responsibility communicates the implied assertion that they can be trusted with responsibility, that they are capable, that they can be active drivers in their educational experience and not simply passive passengers. It is often easier for adults to be in charge, but it will help build the resilience muscle in kids if they are given individual and collective responsibility for more and more elements of their daily experience.