Parenting and Resilience
Anne Paphitis on raising resilient kids through patience and practice
A former school founder explains why every child carries resilience, and how parents help it surface by listening, letting teens learn safely and planning for the worst case.
How to Raise Resilient Kids: Parenting Tips for Building Confidence in Tweens & Teens | Ann Paphitis
Video from Where Parents Talk TV.
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How can parents help their kids build resilience?
Parents build resilience by creating the conditions for it rather than demanding it. Anne Paphitis advises listening without projecting adult feelings onto a child, matching each lesson to how that child learns, letting teenagers learn safely through experience, and offering repeated chances to succeed, backed by patient and careful feedback after every attempt.
Anne Paphitis is a resilience coach, speaker and personal reinvention expert who founded and ran a school for young people who did not fit mainstream education, many of whom were dealing with anxiety, depression or bullying. Speaking on the Where Parents Talk podcast, Paphitis explained what years of that work revealed about how children and teenagers recover from setbacks.
The central claim is simple and hopeful: resilience is not a trait some children have and others lack. In the view of Paphitis, every child carries it, but it can be buried, suppressed or damaged, especially in the teenage years, and it needs the right conditions, steady nurturing and a great deal of patience before it shows.
For parents, that changes the job. Instead of pushing a child to toughen up, the task becomes building an environment where resilience can surface. Paphitis points to three practical levers: listening without projecting adult feelings onto a child, matching the lesson to how each child learns, and giving young people repeated chances to prove to themselves that they can cope.
Key takeaways
- Resilience exists in every child, but it needs the right conditions, nurturing and patience before it becomes visible.
- Parents should remember their child is a different person and avoid projecting their own feelings and fears onto them.
- Some teenagers learn resilience by being told, while many only accept the lesson once they have experienced it safely.
- Repeated small wins and careful feedback close the gap between a child believing they can cope and actually coping.
1. Resilience is buried, not missing
Paphitis did not learn about resilience from a textbook. Running a school for students who struggled in mainstream settings, the lessons came from the children themselves. Some needed only a little encouragement before they bounced back. For others, the capacity to recover was buried so deeply that it took years of steady support before it began to show.
The teenage years make that work harder. Younger children often bounce back more easily, but as they move into adolescence their resilience becomes easier to suppress or even destroy. That is why Paphitis argues that the adults around a struggling teenager have to keep believing in the possibility of change, even when the evidence looks thin.
Colleagues sometimes told Paphitis that a particular student would never get through. The answer was always the same: keep believing, keep trusting and stay patient in the face of real adversity. Behaviour that looks like self-sabotage, in this view, is a signal to try a different angle rather than a reason to give up on the child.
2. Listen to the child in front of you
Paphitis describes a moment of clarity as a parent: looking at a daughter and realising that this was a different person, with a different experience and view of the world. That insight sits at the heart of the advice for parents, because projecting our own perceptions onto a child quietly blocks real understanding.
Parents are often more patient with a colleague or a stranger than with their own children, Paphitis observes, because early parenting involves shaping a child's outlook so closely that it is easy to assume they share it. In feedback meetings at the school, explaining how a child was actually experiencing life was often a watershed moment for parents.
Teenagers frequently say their parents do not understand and get cross when they try to explain. A parent can be patient and still not hear what is being said. When communication stalls, Paphitis recommends bringing in someone the child trusts, such as a teacher or a professional, to act as a bridge and keep conversations from overheating.
3. Practice turns belief into confidence
Can resilience be taught, or must it be experienced? Paphitis answers yes and no. Some young people grasp an idea as soon as it is laid out for them. Many teenagers, though, learn through experience and experiment, so parents who keep repeating the same lesson may need to find a safe way for the child to discover it firsthand.
There is rarely a single tipping point. In the experience of Paphitis, change usually builds like a snowball rolling down a hill, slow and almost invisible at first before it gathers its own momentum. One success will not undo years of self-doubt, so parents need to create repeated opportunities for a child to prove they can do something.
That practice applies to parents too, because the way adults give feedback after each attempt shapes a child's self-esteem. Paphitis also teaches a simple tool for fear: sit down and think through the worst outcome that could happen and the other possible outcomes. Naming the realistic risks makes a daunting step feel manageable and keeps young people moving forward.
