COMMUNITY
Your Kids
Childhood Resilience:
The Myth and The Reality
resilience: (specifically relating to psychological resilience)
noun; 1. The ability to mentally or emotionally cope with a crisis or to return to pre-crisis status quickly. 2. The process of adapting well in the face of adversity, trauma, tragedy, threats, or significant sources of stress. 3. The ability to bounce back to a previous state.
80 FALL 2020
WITH MINDY HYATT SPRADLIN
If there is one word I’ve heard tossed around over the past two months in regard to children and COVID, it’s the word resilience or resilient. Recently, while sharing some concerns about my nine year old son and the effects that remote learning, quarantining, public mask wearing and social distancing at school were having on him, I was met by many well-meaning people with the common response: “Don’t worry! He’ll be fine. He’ll bounce back. Kids are so resilient.” But is it actually true? I began to wonder. I wanted to believe it was, and I even found myself repeating that specific statement to others. It sure made me feel better to say it or think it. But I soon found out, it wasn’t entirely true, and actually, mostly it was false. While sitting in my therapist’s office one afternoon, I shared with her the concerns I was having about my son. I gave her an update on the situation, and as I came to the end of the update I said, “I know kids are resilient, but I’m just not sure…” She cut me off and said, “Mindy. Kids are not resilient. That is a myth. Kids are malleable.” Full stop. I knew she was right. I felt it deep in my gut. And what she said now required something of me. I couldn’t pretend I didn’t know. Is it possible that we as parents and caregivers and even our policy makers sometimes equate flexibility with resilience? I believe we do, and we do our children a great disservice while doing so. In the two weeks following the county schools reopening announcement, Elizabeth Saffle, President of Cool Springs Psychiatric, LLC in Williamson County, says the clinic saw a very large increase in new patient requests. They usually have about fifty new patient requests per month, and they were seeing that many new patient requests per week. As she talked with parents who were concerned about their children, it was evident to her that a considerable number of children were not bouncing back. Many, many were getting stuck, and they didn’t have the tools or resources to get unstuck by themselves. Recently, reported suicide rates in many states back up this information as well. In September it was reported that Cook Children’s Medical Center has had more
than double the normal number of suicide patients so far this year. Shelby Phillips, LPC-MHSP and Registered Play Therapist along with Angela Landry, LMFT, both with private practices in Williamson County, have also seen a massive influx of requests for support from both returning and new clientele, including children and adults. Some requests have been specifically related to the emotional and mental challenges that COVID-19 has brought on, and others have been related to underlying issues that have been exacerbated by the COVID-19 environment. Trauma is happening everywhere. Big and small. We are living through it, and it’s happening on a global scale as a shared reality. We can’t fully escape it, but we must be honest about it and its affects to move forward in a healthy way and help our children do the same. Angela Landry, LMFT, with Restoration Counseling in Franklin explained the myth of resilience in children this way: “When people talk about resilience in kids, they usually mean kids are flexible. Indeed, kids are naturally flexible, and that’s developmentally healthy. At the same time, that natural flexibility has lifelong consequences. With that flexibility, we can bend kids so that they go through life bent in that direction.” So, as I studied all this and talked with professional after professional along with many parents, I realized three things.
1. Big and prolonged changes in our children’s current environment, like constant social distancing in school, remote learning (both constant and infrequent), mask wearing of the public continually, reduced physical touch, fear, uncertainty with navigating the current social climate, lack of direct interaction with peers and many, many more COVID related challenges, have the very real possibility of negatively affecting them. 2. True resilience, while vital for healthy development and growth, isn’t something that generally comes naturally to most children, and must instead be cultivated and learned.
