As loving parents, we understandably long to protect our precious children from all suffering, risks, hardships, and adversity. Yet we recognize that this is neither possible nor ultimately desirable, since we will not be permanently available to serve as their shield against the demands and difficulties of life.  Furthermore, we realize that each person’s challenges constitute a customized crucible, divinely ordained to actualize his dormant potential and fulfill his unique purpose in life.

What, then, is our role in preparing our children to cope with and rebound from the myriad stressors in store for them? Implicit in “Bonding with our Children” (Mind, Body and Soul, May 2015) is the heartening fact that parents play a key role in inculcating the strengths, skills, beliefs, and attitudes conducive to lifelong resilience.

Our Role as Parents

By providing consistent, unconditional love and forging deep bonds of attachment between parent and child, we create a strong sense of safety and security. By openly expressing our own personal relationship with Hashem, transmitting our emunah and bitachon to our children through our everyday reactions to stressors and challenges, and modeling how we turn to Hashem for guidance and support (through both formal and spontaneous tefillah), we enable our children to develop a wellspring of spiritual connection and conviction which will sustain them for the rest of their lives. Secure in the awareness that nothing is random, that Hashem is guiding all of life’s circumstances for our ultimate benefit, and that He doesn’t mete out challenges that exceed our coping capacities, our children absorb the sense that they are (or will become) equipped to withstand and surmount whatever life brings. By believing in our children and helping them recognize and develop their strengths, we help them to gain confidence in their own competence. By fostering loving connections with extended family and loyal participation in the Jewish community as a whole, we inculcate a sense of personal worth and meaning, an awareness of belonging to something larger than ourselves, and a deeper sense of purpose and security. This spawns the desire to contribute and the satisfaction of feeling needed and appreciated.   By providing a solid, coherent chinuch, we instill values, a staunch clarity concerning right and wrong. By “emotion coaching,” fostering executive functioning and coping skills – including the ability to delay gratification, inhibit and regulate impulses, exercise self-control and self-discipline, tolerate frustration and setbacks in pursuit of  goals, problem-solve and resolve conflicts cooperatively, etc. – we foster the development of intrapsychic and interpersonal competence, as well as character. Character leads to better behavioral choices and decision making, along with improved ability to foresee the consequences of our behaviors and their impact on others, as well as on ourselves. 

A Psycho-Spiritual Dimension

Interestingly, most of the parenting practices described above correlate with components which have been identified by numerous authors as elements of resilience. A number of these factors can also be viewed as incorporating a “psycho-spiritual” dimension. A chief contributor to the contemporary general literature on fostering resilience in children is Dr. Kenneth Ginsburg. In his award-winning book, “Building Resilience in Children and Teens: Giving Kids Roots and Wings,” Ginsburg postulates that there are seven interrelated factors which create resilience: Competence, confidence, connection, character, contribution, coping, and control. In this case, control means a sense of self-efficacy, the ability to affect outcomes by exercising self-control and free will and making responsible choices. For the Jew, this aspect is epitomized, for example, by our Rosh HaShanah declaration that through “teshuva, tefillah, and tzedakah” we can “overturn negative (Divine) decrees.”

 In “Bouncing Back: Rewiring Your Brain for Maximum Resilience and Well-Being,” Linda Graham suggests an alternative, partially overlapping, categorization of variables, the five C’s of resilient coping: Calm, clarity, connection, competence, and courage. As she describes courage, “You can strengthen your faith to persevere in your actions until you come to resolution or acceptance of the difficulty.” 

Edward Hallowell’s “The Childhood Roots of Adult Happiness: Five Steps to Help Kids Create and Sustain Lifelong Joy” posits a cycle of five repeating steps: Connection, play, practice, mastery, and recognition, which incorporate the “ability to create and sustain joy,” and the “ability to deal with adversity.” Hallowell explains that “connectedness naturally leads to moral behavior” and “If you feel connected, you will always be able to deal with adversity.” Of course, this highlights again the supreme significance of the child’s kesher with Hashem, his parents, extended family, and the Jewish people as a whole.

Many authors in the resilience literature cite Martin Seligman’s “Learned Optimism: How to Change your Mind and Your Life” and “The Optimistic Child,” noting that optimism is a key factor in resilience.  Seligman points out that Jewish belief fosters optimism. In “Learned Optimism” he states, “The life committed to nothing larger than itself is a meager life indeed. Human beings require a context of meaning and hope… It consists of a belief in the nation, in God, in one’s family, or in a purpose that transcends our lives.”

Living for Higher Values

This approach can also be credited to Viktor Frankl, the architect of logotherapy. In “Man’s Search for Meaning,” he described the exalted  human capacity for resilience and transcendence manifested under the horrendous conditions of his concentration camp experience:  “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of human freedoms — to choose one’s own attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way…. in the final analysis it becomes clear that the sort of person the prisoner became was the result of an inner decision, and not the result of camp influences alone. Fundamentally, therefore, any man can, even under such circumstances, decide what shall become of him, mentally and spiritually. He may retain his human dignity even in a concentration camp.” 

Incredibly, what Frankl wrote concerning adult concentration camp inmates was even exemplified by some of the Jewish children in the camps. In his recently released “Heroic Children: Untold Stories of the Unconquerable,” Rabbi Hanoch Teller details the epic valor of nine children who demonstrated courage, tenacity, and, in many cases, self-sacrifice and altruism far beyond their years, under the most terrifying and bestial circumstances. When I asked Rabbi Teller what conclusions he could draw from his research on these “Heroic Children” which would shed light on our subject of fostering resilience in Jewish children today, he explained that the children he depicted shared a strong connection and commitment to others, as well as an indestructible drive for survival. To paraphrase his response, “Yet as much as they valued survival, they lived for higher values, and they would not choose survival at the expense of those. It was never about survival at any price.”

When viewed in this light and against the tragic background of the relatively recent loss of more than one million Jewish children during the Holocaust, our efforts to foster resilience and unswerving commitment to our heritage and values in the Jewish youth of today, who also face an uncertain future in an often hostile world, take on greater urgency and significance. May we and they be equal to the challenges Hashem has designed for us!

Chaya Drucker, MSW, LCSW, ACSW has had approximately 30 years of experience as a psychotherapist and parenting coach. She is in private practice with offices in Lakewood and in Highland Park, New Jersey. Chaya also created “Al Baneinu V’Al Doroseinu,” an initiative aimed at early intervention to benefit potentially “at risk” children. She can be reached at 732 236-3110 or 732 985-1119.