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Build Your Child’s Back-to-School Resilience to Support Their Ultimate Success

If you are like most parents, your primary objective is to support your children to be prepared to handle the pressures of adulthood. If you have wondered what the most important thing you can do now to support your child is, this article has answers and they may not be what you think: If there is one human trait which helps to navigate all of life’s stages, it is resilience.

Resilience is the ability to bounce back, move forward, and learn from negativity and setbacks in life. As a parent, the greatest gift you can give your child is the gift of learning how to make mistakes, learn from them, and grow as a result. Sounds to you like common sense? How you do this may be surprising. The foundation for developing resilience in your child is threefold: 1) to develop resilience in your own life; 2) to allow your child the freedom to make mistakes, the security to learn from those mistakes and the opportunity to move forward after those mistakes; and 3) to let your children see you make mistakes and role model resilience for them with vulnerable power.

Building Resilience in Children

It’s ideal to strike a balance between open communication with your children, sharing your mistakes and lessons, and shielding them from information that may create unnecessary insecurity. The back-to-school season can be a great opportunity to build these skills in yourself and your children, as they are presented with new challenges and, sometimes, disheartening failures.

Here’s an example of what I mean: when my daughter Hannah, was entering high school, she had dreams of playing field hockey with her friends, traveling to and from games together. Playing was an athletic endeavor, certainly, but to Hannah, it was so much more. Imagine her heartbreak when, just days before school started, she was cut from the team. As a young woman who had always achieved that to which she set her mind before, she was despondent. My wife, Paula, and I, were saddened right along with her!

But, we encouraged our daughter to look at this experience as a way to expand her horizons that year, and look for new activities to fill her afterschool hours. She found a new love in the school newspaper. She began writing for it, making new friends along the way, while learning about and honing a talent she didn’t previously know she possessed.

Getting cut from the team was hard, but now Hannah is pursuing a degree in Journalism at college and couldn’t be more excited about her future. All of it, a path she might not have taken had she not had to face a failure, and been encouraged to grow through it.

When your child makes a mistake, celebrate the opportunity to learn, rather than reinforcing the “wrongness” of the experience. Remember, some of the most successful people on the planet failed first. What made them an ultimate success? They had the resilience and support to recognize that failure was simply part of the journey and to keep going.

Estate Planning and Resilience

So how does estate planning fit into developing resilience in your children? First and foremost, resilience comes when your children know that no matter what happens, you love and accept them and will always be there for them. It is having that deep knowledge that creates the security that allows your children to take the risks that others can’t or won’t. That’s the ultimate foundation of true life success.

When you’ve handled your estate planning and talked with your kids about what you’ve set up (see our post here on how to have “the talk”), they get the clear message that you’ve done everything possible to be there for them, even if you cannot be there physically.

And by including them in the process, when they are old enough, they began to see that you trust them, that you are working with them to design a future that is positive for your whole family and that you trust and respect their input.

As a parent and a Personal Family Lawyer,® I understand that your desire to protect everything for which you work so hard, including the intangible like perserverance and resilience. That’s why The Parents Estate Planning Law Firm, PC incorporates Legacy Planning into our family estate planning services, and why we offer a Family Wealth Planning Session,™ where we can explain financial management techniques and help identify the best strategies for you and your family. You can begin by calling our office today to schedule a time for us to sit down and talk because this planning is so important.
To your family’s health, wealth and happiness!

David Feakes

P.S. Want to get started on the most important planning you’ll ever do for your family? Give our office a call at (978) 263-6900 to get started. You’ll be so glad you did.

David Feakes is the owner of The Parents Estate Planning Law Firm, PC – a law firm for families in the Acton, Massachusetts area. David helps parents protect the people they love the most. If you would like to receive David’s exclusive, free report, “Six Major Mistakes To Avoid When Choosing An Estate Planning Attorney,” you can get it right here.

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THE PARENTS ESTATE PLANNING LAW FIRM, PC

At The Parents Estate Planning Law Firm, we answer your questions at your convenience; we stay in frequent communication; and we meet to discuss changes in life circumstances and in the law to ensure that your assets are protected.

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