Why We Need to Help Our Children Do Hard Things: Building Resilience

By Kelly Hutton

A child needs to do the hard things... and take risks

We all want our children to be happy and importantly, thrive. This means they need to cope with friendship fallouts, to cope with the nerves before a performance or to cope with disappointment, mistakes, fear or change for example.

In other words, we want them to be resilient.

But resilience is not just leaving them to "get on with it". It also isn't about forcing them into overwhelming situations either. Resilience grows when children do the hard things with support.

This is especially important if you have an anxious child. So, let's take a look at:

• What resilience actually is

• Why avoiding hard things can quietly reduce resilience

• Why supported challenge grows resilience

• And why the language we use when our children are struggling is crucial

Let's explore how this is all grounded with the evidence-backed research.

What is Resilience?

So, resilience is not just 'toughness'. It isn't brushing it off or never feeling anxious. What resilience is is a skill, an ability. The ability to adapt and recover when life is difficult.

Psychologists define resilience as the process and outcome of successfully adapting to adversity or stress (Chbeir & Carrion, 2023; Kim & Low, 2024). Importantly, resilience is a dynamic process, not a fixed personality trait, which develops with a combination of biology, relationships, environment and experience (Chbeir & Carrion, 2023; Antony, 2022).

Shaped by supportive relationships, opportunities to practise coping, emotional regulation skills, a sense of belonging and the belief that effort makes a difference (Kim & Low, 2024), grows resilience in the context in which it is needed. It is neither static nor stable and can come and go dependent on the context.

The Balance Scale: Why Hard Things Matter

One of the clearest ways to explain this comes from Kim & Low (2024), who describe resilience like a balance scale.

On one side:

• Stress

• Setbacks

• Fear

• Adversity

On the other:

• Supportive relationships

• Coping skills

• Belief in oneself

• Positive experiences

When protective factors outweigh the risk, the scale tips toward positive development. But the key point here is that children will not build those coping skills by avoiding all of the stress. Stress is required to provide learning opportunities for the coping skills to be developed and refined. Our children will build resilience by experiencing manageable stress and successfully navigating it with the right support.

Now, please note, I say manageable stress relevant to your child's age and development. This might look like a range of things, from completing homework which seems hard, attending a party that they are worried about, to even simply completing regular chores and being given age-appropriate responsibilities which teach them skills they need when they are adults, these manageable stressful opportunities are everywhere.

Why Avoiding Hard Things Shrinks Resilience

When your child says "I can't", "I'm too scared", "I don't want to", most often our instinct is to rescue and excuse them. Sometimes this is appropiate, if the stressful situation is not appropiate for their age or developmental level for example; however, if we consistently remove every uncomfortable experience, we accidentally remove the opportunity to build capacity.

Chronic stress can overwhelm the brain and the body (Chbeir & Carrion, 2023). But manageable stress, paired with regulation and support, strengthens adaptive systems.

Brown (2015) highlights that resilient individuals tend to:

• Strive for a sense of control

• Use problem-focused coping

• Develop an internal locus of control (the belief that their actions matter)

If we are constantly stepping in for our children and removing the hard things, then our children lose opportunities to learn that:

"I can influence outcomes"

"I can survive discomfort"

"I can try again"

Instead, they may learn:

• "Hard things are dangerous"

• "I need someone else to fix this"

The Crucial Difference: Supported Challenge vs Forced Exposure

Resilience is not built on overwhelm, but it does grow through co-regulated challenge.

Antony (2022) draws on Brofenbrenner's ecological systems theory, which reminds us that children develop resilience through reciprocal relationships within their microsystems. Basically, through their parents and teachers. This means that resilience grows within relationships; it won't grow in isolation.

Children are more likely to adapt positively when they experience:

• Emotional attunement

• Secure attachment

• Adult modelling of coping

(Kovacs et al., 2022; Chbeir & Carrion, 2023).

So when we help a child attempt something difficult whilst staying connected, calm, and confident, we are strengthening their resilience systems. Simply doing it all for them, whilst they are completely disconnected from the experience will do nothing.

Emotional Intelligence: The Inner Skillset

Resilience is really closely linked to emotional intelligence. This feels like a relatively new buzz term doing the rounds on the socials, but basically it means:

• Emotional perception

• Emotional understanding

• Emotional regulation

(Rao & Koneru, 2024)

Children with stronger emotional regulation skills cope more effectively with stress and adapt more positively (Rao & Koneru, 2024). But emotional regulation does not develop by telling children to "calm down". It develops when adults:

• Name emotions

• Validate feelings

• Model regulation

• Stay steady during distress

Resilience and emotional intelligence have a reciprocal relationship (Rao & Koneru, 2024) and when we help children understand and manage emotions during hard tasks, we strengthen both.

The Language We Use

Brown (2015) emphasises that being explicit about resilience concepts increases effectiveness, as the language we use shapes children's internal narratives.

Compare:

❌ “It’s fine, don’t worry.”

❌ “You’ll be okay.”

❌ “It’s not that hard.”

Versus:

✔ “This feels tricky, and you’re learning how to handle tricky.”

✔ “I can see you’re nervous. Let’s take it step by step.”

✔ “You haven’t done this yet, but you’re practising.”

Using the approaches in the second list validates emotion, encourages effort, builds a growth mindset and reinforces agency. This fosters the internal locust of control (Brown, 2015) and agency is the foundation to resilience.

Practical Strategies to Build Resilience Through Hard Things

Grounded in the research I have previously quoted, here are the top evidence-aligned strategies that I have found and do in practice. I will use an example I recently had with my youngest who was feeling incredibly overwhelmed, with revision for his GCSE's, swim training and just general teenage life,. He was feeling really anxious about undertaking a lifeguarding course, which meant giving up his half term and going to a course with people he didn't know, by himself. I could have just as easily said "you don't need to do it, we can cancel it" however I knew this was one of those times where there was an learning opportunity to build resilience, so I:

1. Name and Normalise Emotions: Building the emotional intelligence, name what you can see and help them to regulate this (Rao & Koneru, 2024). My son was really struggling to verbalise why he didn't want to do the course, he couldn't tell me exactly why he didn't want to do it. I named it as what it looked like to me "It looks like you are anxious about the unknown and worried about the workload. I get that at times, when I do, I feel like theres a knot in my stomach and a kind of dread of what is to come. When I get this, I ground myself and remember where I am now, re-focus on what I am doing right now"

   Here I did a 3 things I am grateful for, we talked about what he really enjoys in life, shifting the focus to the now.

   
   

2. Start Small and Gradual: Resilience grows through incremental exposure, not flooding (Brown, 2015). Break hard tasks into small managable tasks. Here I helped him to just focus on what he has to do right now "all you need to do right this minute is get out of bed and go to the shower" I reminded him throughout that evening and morning, just to focus on the task he needed to do in that exact moment.

3. Stay Connected: Secure relationships buffer stress responses (Chbeir & Carrion, 2023). I stayed physically and emotionally present for him throughout the week, well for the first few days when I knew he was finding it hard, he soon got into the swing of it by the Wednesday. I reminded him that he done day 1, then day 2. I helped him with a few chores to help free up a bit of mental space for him, checked in and let others know he needed a bit of support at the moment.

4. Reinforce Effort Over Outcome: Encouraing growth mindset and internal locust of control means reminding our children that they are doing it. It's "You kept trying, even when it felt hard". I reminded my son that he had got up and gone into the first day, that he had done the second. That he had put in the effort and he was doing the hard thing which felt nearly impossible to him on the Sunday.

5. Model Regulation: Children really do learn coping from us (Antony, 2022), so letting them see you breathe, pause, problem-solve really is important. I don't keep secrets about when I am struggling from my children, I never really have. In the past, I have spoken to them (with what was age appropiate) if I was struggling and I have problem-solved outloud and had them contribute their own opinions. Now they are teenagers, this is actually harder then when they were younger, but this is purely because they are consistently either studying, in their room or with their friends!

6. Encourage Meaning: Resilience is linked to purpose and positive emotion generation (Chbeir & Carrion, 2023). This is as simple as telling our children that doing hard things makes our brain grow. With my son, in this situation, I expressed that I wish I could just make the hard thing go away, but this won't help him in the long run. By doing this now, he will get so much more out of it, not just a lifeguarding qualification, but confidence, and the opportunity to learn that doing the hard things matter.

As it was, he did complete the qualification, he didn't die and I really do think he got so much more out of that week then if he had spent it playing computer games instead.

My Final Thought

Our job is not to remove every obstacle, but to stand beside our children whilst they climb. In the case with my youngest, I felt awful watching how much he was struggling that Sunday evening, I really did want to just take away the hard thing for him. But when our children feel fear, try anyway, experience the support and discover that they survived, it quietly trains them to understand:

"I can do the hard things"

With that belief comes the confidence, not a loud, arrogance, but a quiet ground kind of confidence that will carry them through life. I don't know about you, but everytime I have to do something I don't want to, my mantra always is:

"I can do the hard things!"

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References

Antony, E. M. (2022). Framing childhood resilience through Bronfenbrenner’s ecological systems theory.

Brown, R. (2015). Building children and young people’s resilience: Lessons from psychology.

Chbeir, S., & Carrión, V. (2023). Resilience by design: How nature, nurture, environment, and microbiome mitigate stress and allostatic load.

Kim, S., & Low, F. (2024). Promoting resilience in children and young people.

Kovács, K. E., et al. (2022). Is resilience a trait or a result of parental involvement? 

Rao, G. P., & Koneru, A. (2024). Developing resilience and harnessing emotional intelligence.