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So many parents feel anxious right now. Political uncertainty, climate change, AI’s impact on learning and an unpredictable job market are leaving many parents to wonder how to best prepare their children for the future.
As an anthropologist and a child and adolescent psychiatrist with 18 years of experience, I’ve worked with children and families facing a wide range of adversity, from war and displacement to the more familiar struggles of friendship breakups, rejection and academic pressure.
Many people mistake resilience for grit or simply pushing through. I’ve found that true resilience comes from the ability to take action, connect to others and stay engaged in life, even when things are not going well.
While individual traits play a role, resilience also grows through relationships and experiences. That’s good news for parents, because there’s a lot we can do to help build it.
1. Let kids experience both mastery and failure
Kids build resilience by having experiences that show them, “I can figure things out.” Help your child identify an activity they enjoy enough to stick with, even if they aren’t great at it right away.
Maybe it’s playing the piano, caring for a pet, baking, drawing comics, or becoming the person in the family who knows how to assemble IKEA furniture. Give them the chance to struggle a little, practice, make mistakes, and eventually improve.
Children need to learn that being bad at something at first doesn’t mean they’ll be bad at it forever. So if your child gets a low grade, strikes out, or doesn’t make the team, give them room to be disappointed.
Later, when emotions have settled, help them look back with curiosity. Ask them:
- “What was the hardest part?”
- “Is there anything you’d want to do differently next time?”
This approach is a subtle way to teach them that failure isn’t something to be ashamed of — they can move through it and learn from it.
2. Help them find problems worth solving, rather than a career to pursue
Too often, we spend a lot of time trying to prepare children for specific careers. We consider which paths will lead to the most stable or lucrative job and work backward from there. But it’s hard to predict what the job market will look like over the next few decades.
Instead, pay attention to the problems your child cares about. Maybe your 8-year-old is furious over plastics in the ocean. Rather than saying, “you should be a marine biologist,” ask:
- “What bothers you about this?”
- “What could someone do about it?”
Help them research the issue, reach out to an expert, or organize a beach cleanup. This approach will show them how to notice what matters to them and then take action in a meaningful way.
3. Teach them how to be good at relationships
As children grow, many of their hardest challenges, both personally and professionally, will involve other people. Technical skills matter, but so does knowing how to build trust, repair conflict, rekindle the connection, ask for help, set boundaries, and maintain close relationships.
Those skills are built through practice. When your 10-year-old comes home angry with a friend, ask what happened. Help your child consider what the other person might have experienced, what your child wants from the relationship, and whether it’s worth fixing.
Let your children see you repair relationships, too. If it’s a fight to leave the house on time, when they get home, tell them, “I was impatient with you this morning, and I’m sorry.” This teaches them more about maintaining relationships than a lecture ever will.
4. Remind them to look beyond themselves
When life gets hard, it’s easy to turn inward, replay what went wrong or wonder what the experience says about us. As children and adolescents develop their identities, they’re especially prone to self-focused thinking.
Give them regular opportunities to be useful to someone else. Let a younger child feed the dog every morning. Have an older child help a younger sibling with homework, check on an elderly neighbor, volunteer, or take responsibility for part of a family project.
You’re not trying to distract children from their own problems or tell them that someone else has it worse. The goal is to remind them that even when things are difficult, they still have the ability to contribute, connect, and matter to someone else.
5. Don’t rush to make them feel better
Parents naturally want their children to feel better. When a child is devastated about not being invited to a party, for example, our instinct is often to immediately try to solve the problem or reassure them with phrases like “Don’t worry about it” or “You’ll have other parties.”
We often believe that resilience means getting rid of difficult feelings. We want children to calm down, think positively or move on.
But the most resilient children do feel disappointment, fear, embarrassment and sadness. They just learn that they can carry those feelings while still going to school, engaging with friends, trying again and doing things that are important to them.
So resist the rush to get rid of the feeling. You might say, “That really hurts. I’m sorry.” Then let them be disappointed. Part of resilience is learning, through experience, that “I’ve felt this bad before, I got through it, and I can be okay again.”
Suzan J. Song, MD, PhD is a Harvard- and Stanford-trained child and adolescent psychiatrist and author of “Why We Suffer and How We Heal” (PRH, 2026). Follow her on Instagram.
