Conscious Parenting: Teaching Resilience

Resilience, defined as the ability to adjust or recover from change or challenges is one of the most important capabilities we can teach our children.  There are many unknowns in life, and making sure they have the strength and hardiness to adapt and spring back is the best way we can prepare them to face the world in any stage of their lives.

This is what Mommy Mundo’s Community Program Director, Kit Malvar Llamas, tackled in the fifth session of the Conscious Parenting series, hosted on Google Meet.

In the session, Kit talked about how children, just like adults, can experience anxiety and worry, which can lead to anger.  However, children tend to take their cues from their parents, and so when parents respond positively to the things that cause anxiety, worry, and anger; when parents are able to take a step back and assess both their own emotions and the situation in order to choose a positive response, children best learn resilience through the embodiment and modeling of their parents in both behaviors and languages.

A large part of conscious parenting is understanding one’s own beliefs and thought patterns, and how these patterns lead us to behave in specific ways, also known as habits and learned behaviours. Through self-awareness and a shift in mindset, parents are able to recognise their own thought patterns and, through a lot of self-discipline and training, change those patterns. But self-awareness is key.

It is also key for children. The sooner parents are able to teach their children self-awareness of their own feelings and behaviour, the sooner they can learn positive responses, which lead to the development of grit and resilience. An important step here is recognising the feelings, thought patterns, and behaviour; knowing where it comes from; and acting positively. This is something that children will only really learn from their parents’ example.

Kit shares:

“Teaching from the “Superpowered: Transforming Anxiety to Resilience” by Dr. Shefali and Renee Jain, Kit shared the 5Ps that lead to Anxiety and its 5Cs antidote.   

When anxiety visits us they usually look and sound like these 5Ps and the counterintuitive practice would help activate calmness to appease anxiety.  For children and teens, it is best that we teach them how to identify them in the most neutral way and even practice how to deal with them when they visit when the visitors are not (yet) present through role plays and discussions.  

From Permanence language (This “always” happens to me.  This will be “forever” )  to Temporary (“This too shall pass.”  This is happening “now”.)

From Pervasive (“This happens to EVERYTHING I do.”) to Specific (“It only happens with these certain friends and not in all aspects of my life.”)

From Personal (“Of course, it’s ME”)  to Accurate (“What led to this situation?”)

From Personal Comparison to Externalizing 

From Panic to Calm Breathing

The key is for us to Feel the Feelings and Decode their messages.  We need to break the pattern of trying to squish and squash them, pacify them, and even bully them.  The more we change our relationship with these feelings, the faster we are able to learn the skill of resilience!  Yes, resilience is a SKILL.  We can learn them and we can get better with it with the proper guidance and consistent practice of the 5Cs.

1. Catch the Thoughts one at a time.

2. Check Holes.

3. Challenge the Thoughts.

4. Collect Evidences

5. Change the Thought.”

Mommy Mundo’s Conscious Parenting workshops have become very popular in the Mommy Mundo community.  Taught by Kit Malvar Llamas, a Conscious Alchemy Strengths Coach and founder and CEO of Camp Explore, the series takes moms and dads through the journey of parenting themselves and their inner child so as to healthily parent their children.

Kit is the first Filipino coach in the Philippines certified with Dr. Shefali Tsabary’s Coaching Institute on the Conscious Parenting Method, a certified facilitator of Dr. Stephen Covey’s, “7 Habits of Highly Effective People”, a Gallup certified Strengths Coach, and People Acuity certified coach and facilitator.