Knowing how to teach a family member of ANY age to be resilient in a trying time is not something we learn at school. Often those of us who feel like we posses "grit" and can push through complexity or difficulty from past experience, have some knowledge of resiliency but it's hard to make it tangible for others. And if your context doesn't match that of another person - even if in the same family - then maybe they won't value advice on being resilience in a credible way.
What I can tell you is this: Resiliency is within all of us and needs to be explored in a "hindsight" kind of a way or examined through the lens of another person. For example if you ask people to explain different times in their lives when they went through a difficult time, they will characterize the time in the hardest period differently from the finishing/reflecting upon the experience. Values like persistence and fortitude have to be shown to the person having experienced it for them to see their role in succeeding at that given challenge. It doesn't mean you have to have exhibited grace under pressure or that you had a smile on your face in the toughest moments to have gone through it and persevered.
Our forbears who lived through drought or famine in history often live longer than those with resources in other countries. Stories of strength and resourcefulness abound in times of war - look to any book or documentary. The resilience is the wheat from the chaff and the cream from the milk - its the portion that rises and shines with a different effort. Yet many just need to be shown how to find meaning in struggle and grace in a time of pressure. It's nowhere in a textbook yet arises from a conversation with a parent, mentor, teacher, etc. But teaching someone to find the space and reflective abilities to review and learn from experiences is not something our society embraces.
Another topic that is related to resiliency but not in an obvious way is trusting oneself. Here is a story from a woman my daughter and I saw at a talk given to adolescent girls who wanted to one day be pilots. The woman was speaking was a pilot for a major airline. She talked about knowing someone in aviation but not considering this field whatsoever. After finishing college and taking a detour from the U.S. workforce, she figured out a way to extend her free spirit from college by working overseas teaching English. You might be thinking of a person backpack and you'd be right in many respects except the highlight of her talk wasn't travel...Along with her job in France teaching verbs and adjectives to francophiles, she also passionately pursued rock climbing for two years. She said something that made explicit what is not often thought of in rock climbing (at least not in my mind). She said, "I LEARNED TO TRUST MYSELF" - It made me ask myself that question. In what situations do I trust myself? How do I allow my 12 year old daughter to trust herself (& my other kids, too). I'm not saying that this woman implied that she was a "know it all" in any sense of that phrase. Rather, in two years of pulling herself up and knowing her strength and acting upon and within new and foreign situations, she in effect could foresee herself in roles that were traditional and non-traditional. She told the girls in the audience and their parents that she returned from oversees, and undertook flying classes because she didn't want to ever be in a cubicle and knew that most any pilot job would give her the freedom she had grown used to. And because she had a deep trust in her own instincts and technical capability, she knew the risks and was willing to accept those risks in flying other people and operating an aircraft that might have technical issues or even have a risk of crashing.
My 12 year old told me around age 10 she wanted to be a pilot. I'm not sure where this feeling came from (my father was a pilot perhaps that was the inspiration). But what I found so vital in this whole exchange was that my daughter seemed to SENSE that she could do this. Nowhere in her mind was the feeling of second guessing that I know would come soon in adolescence. I also knew that unless I foster her own sense of trust in herself, the world will easily take that away. Now I don't guarantee what the future holds in my daughter being a pilot. But I can tell you she has a love of science and no fear of math (both of which affected me), and has now seen/met pilots who are women (thanks to Girls in Aviation Day) and sees a path forward. There are many, many other steps involved to make this materialize as a hobby or career, but I'm happy to help my daughter know her ideas are worth trusting.
How can resilience and fostering self-trust come to pass in your household? I can tell you when my mom and dad had Parkinson's and their physical abilities began to falter, their own self-trust also declined. Once we went to a restaurant and I gave my parents my own order thinking they would place it for all of us while I popped into a store to buy an item. I was gone 15 minutes and never did my parents wave down a waiter and place the order. They were timid and afraid to "do it wrong" - placing the order for food, that is! I was shocked that my parents who had worked and had vital lives and the only change was their walker or wheelchair -- now they felt they didn't have the skills to wave a waiter and place an order. It showed me that unless our kids and elders are LED to continue to allow themselves to trust themselves, take small and bigger risks and know they are in the zone of where failure is OK, they can keep steady their sense of resilience. But if they don't have those conditions and supervision and mentoring, self-trust and resilience are not made explicit in their lives and these skills falter or go away entirely.
I could also use a mentor for expanding my own comfort zone but for now and coaching myself through things like job changes, what to do with the path I have set for myself to help caregivers through training classes, and how I can expand the people I reach out to so that I am helping the caregivers in families that need it most. I like to see it as a metaphor related to climbing (without the risk)...by holding the rope I have a tether and can pull myself along. I don't have to go on one linear path, I can pick my own. And the judgements I make about my path are own. Others can weigh in, but the sense and definition I give this path is from the meaning I make from it. And now that is my own version of a textbook resilience-making skill!
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