How to Raise Brave, Resilient Kids and Prevent Highschool Meltdowns

It’s been 2 years since Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook CEO and author of Lean In, lost her husband to a heart attack and embarked on a journey to ensure that her two young kids would grow up strong, brave and happy.  Out of this came her latest book, Plan B: Facing Adversity, Building Resilience, and Finding Joy, (Knopf, 2017) in which she talks about her experiences trying to raise resilient, joyful youngsters.

I’ve been writing and speaking over the past year about how kids these days seem less confident, more unhappy and less resilient than ever before, and how helicopter parenting is in large part to blame. I’m referring to the over-protective, coddling, enabling type of parenting that produces overly-entitled young people who are nevertheless unable to cope with even the most insignificant challenges. Despite their best intentions, helicopter parents are setting up their kids for failure in all aspects of their lives.

I believe that helicopter parents are responsible for creating a mental health crisis in our Colleges and Universities. Armed with great love but misguided notions of parenting, they’re raising kids who struggle so hard to cope with the ordinary challenges of high school that by the time they reach the post-secondary level, these young people are having emotional melt-downs on a regular basis.

In a recent article in the Toronto Star the writer, Andrea Gordon, talked about how more and more high school kids are showing up at the guidance office with mental health issues and how the school counselors are stretched to their limit, not having enough staff to handle either the intensity of the problems or the number of kids who need help.

In another article in the Star by Samantha Beattie, the writer refers to a study by Children’s Mental Health Ontario, which found that almost half of the students in the province have missed school at some point because of anxiety.

Most helicopter parents are just trying their best to help their kids, but by doing too much for them they’re crippling their kids emotionally. These kids grow up not knowing how to stand on their own two feet, solve their own problems, advocate for themselves or bounce back from adversity. By the time these kids get to high school or college, they’re primed for an emotional collapse.

Some helicopter parents are overly-invested in their kids’ performance, convinced that if their kids do well at school, they’ll feel better about themselves. These parents will do their kids’ homework; they’ll call up the teacher or the principal to argue about grades, and they’ll pressure colleges to accept their kids, even when the kids don’t meet the admission requirements.

The children of this type of parent are at a double disadvantage: not only are they unable to cope on an emotional level, they haven’t been allowed to develop the academic skills that would lead to success in post-secondary education. When faced with mediocre grades and the stress of the expectations associated with higher education, these kids are primed for a breakdown.

Recently, for my Ruthless Compassion podcast series, I interviewed Dr. Holly Rogers, a psychiatrist in charge of student mental health at Duke University in North Carolina. Dr. Rogers described the same problems in several of her students.

Dr. Rogers pointed out that those students who were raised by helicopter parents have been struggling, while those who’ve had to face some adversity in their young lives and who were expected to deal with problems for the most part on their own are by comparison, doing much better, both academically and socially.

Neither I nor Dr. Rogers are advocating that we abandon our kids or deliberately put them in harm’s way but we’re both aware of how too much enabling and spoiling will create kids who lack the basic coping strategies necessary for success at school and in life.

It’s important that we rethink how we parent our kids. If we truly want the best for them, we must do like Sheryl Sandberg did and focus on growing resilient, empowered kids. We must start instilling the skills and attitudes into our high-school-aged kids that will enable them to face the challenges of post-secondary education and the world of work that follows.

We need to stop doing our kids’ homework and calling up the teacher or the principal every time we don’t like our kid’s grade. Maybe it’s time to figure out why our kid is struggling with that particular class. Maybe the child needs extra help, or maybe they just need to develop better study habits.

We need to stop over-scheduling our kids and allow them to go out and play on their own, without adult supervision or control. We need to trust our kids and recognize that they’re smart, resourceful people who are better able to take care of themselves than we’ve given them credit for. When our kids can spend time just playing with one-another, they’ll learn essential life skills, including leadership, cooperation, problem-solving, flexibility and compassion.

We need to stop over-protecting our kids and fighting all their battles for them. We can teach them good coping skills and let them go out and practice these skills. This is how they’ll gain confidence and competence and it’s how they’ll begin to learn from their mistakes and their failures. They’ll become strong, capable, resilient kids who’ll grow into high-functioning young adults.

High school is our last chance to change the way we parent before we send our kids off to college and into adult life. If we truly love them, we must stop hovering over them and start preparing them for the very real challenges that lie ahead.

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