However, most of these children will not ever need to know the formula for salt. They can google the state capitals. And it is highly unlikely that lack of knowledge of the plant phyla will inhibit their careers in a significant way. Nor will Hot Cross Buns have an impact on their ultimate success in life.
Join Our Waitlist
Resilience-Based Parenting, our 52-skill toolkit for raising resilient kids, is full until February 2021 ... but get the next best thing.
When you join our waitlist, you will receive a free copy of our ebook, The Five Most Important Conversations to Have with Your Kids This Week.
About Our 52-Skill Toolkit, Resilience-Based Parenting™
Have you ever wondered why certain parents have such good relationships with their kids? Why some kids are so well-adjusted, successful and happy? Why some families are so tight-knit they seem to grow closer and stronger even through challenges and setbacks?
The great news is that resilience can be learned! There are things you can do to make your children and your family more resilient so that you enjoy your interactions, strengthen your bond as a family unit, and feel confident in your role as a parent.
That is the focus of Resilience-Based Parenting™—to make everyone in your family more resilient and to improve your relationships with each other along the way. When you join Resilience-Based Parenting, you will learn skills and have access to 52 tools that you have likely never learned and that will make you feel much more empowered and optimistic about the future of your family.
Skills-Based Lessons
Explore the ten pillars of Resilience-Based Parenting™ through our skills-based tools delivered weekly to your inbox. The audio lessons are brief (usually under ten minutes), and they will give you powerful aha moments for changing your relationships with your kids and improving your family dynamics.
Weekly Assignments
Put your new Resilience-Based Parenting™ skills to work by completing weekly assignments that improve your children's resilience, decrease the friction in your household, and, perhaps most important of all, increase the positive interactions you have with each of your family members.
Additional Resources
Resilience-Based Parenting™ is packed with additional resources that will help you feel more confident about your role as a parent. We have been studying resilience for two decades, and our resilience-training programs and the skills included in this toolkit have been validated in four studies.
Meet Kristin MacDermott, Creator of the MacDermott Method
Hi, I'm Kristin MacDermott, and I'm a licensed marriage and family therapist, as well as the creator of the MacDermott Method.
My resilience-training programs have been validated in four studies (including two randomized-controlled trials) with researchers from the Duke Clinical Research Institute, published in peer-review journals, and proven to promote clinically significant improvement in key resilience measures, including distress, anxiety, depression, PTSD, and self-efficacy.
Over the past two decades, I have developed resilience-training programs for some of the highest performing people on the planet, including Navy SEALS, the Los Angeles Police Department, and healthcare providers at 20 hospitals across the country. I have created programs for cancer patients, divorcing families, parents, athletes, students and for mentors and at-risk youth in inner city Los Angeles.
My passion is helping children. All of us will face obstacles. There's no preventing it. But when we teach children resilience skills, we open the doors for them to move past these obstacles quickly and access their best-feeling life. We give them the tools to choose good-feeling relationships, to pursue their dreams, and to grow into self-confident, compassionate, solution-focused adults.
Resilience-Based Parenting Scholarships
Families need resilience now more than ever. Yet, one thing we know from our work with kids in low-income, under-served neighborhoods is this: Too often, parents and kids miss out on opportunities because of cost. And with so many people who have lost their jobs due to coronavirus, the divide is growing even bigger.
To this end, we have a scholarship program whereby you can sponsor a family to join Resilience-Based Parenting™, or apply for a scholarship to join free of charge.
The Conversation Is the Relationship
When you have good conversations with your kids, you have good relationships with your kids. The moms and dads who nail the parenting thing are the ones who have authentic, candid conversations with their kids—even about the most uncomfortable subjects.
We believe the conversation is the relationship. The two cannot be separated. If you want to change the relationship, then, change the conversation.
In Resilience-Based Parenting™, you learn 52 skills for raising your children's self-awareness, confidence, and emotional intelligence through the power of great conversations. These skills have been validated in four clinical studies and have been used by the Duke Cancer Institute and the National Institutes of Health. Not only do they build resilience, but they also improve relationships.
About Resilience in Children
By the times kids graduate from high school, they will have received about 13,000 hours in training, supposedly to prepare them for success in the real world.
Almost all of this training is based on IQ and academic success.
Kids learn the formula for salt.
They memorize the state capitals.
They learn about plant phyla.
And they learn how to play Hot Cross Buns on a recorder.
Yet, 100 percent of these children will face an obstacle at some point in their lives. Even if they don’t get divorced, lose a job, have a financial crisis, or face a frightening diagnoses, they will certainly fail at something. Merely surviving the teenage years with your self-esteem intact is a daunting challenge for most people.
So, why do we focus so much on training kids to get A’s in calculus and no time teaching them the skills to be successful at life?
No Curriculum Exists for Teaching Resilience
For all of the emphasis placed on education, no curriculum exists in which students are taught skills for dealing with negative emotions, navigating challenging relationships, and taking care of themselves in the face of high levels of stress.
Instead, our children are put into pressurized molds, funneled through a one-size-fits-all system, taught to conform, conform, conform. Then they are released into college where they are asked to declare a major and set the course for their future without ever being taught to listen to their own internal compasses and with no guidance on how to discover their unique gifts and passions or any support for honoring their own needs and strengths.
This is a national disgrace. Indeed, the most important subject is missing from our children’s education.
It Starts Early
From a young age, rather than exploring and learning to trust their own internal guidance, most children are trained to please everyone else. Instead of looking inward for clarity and guidance, they focus most of their time making sure that the outside world likes them. Starting in kindergarten, they are expected to please their teachers. Junior high hits, and most children start worrying about what their friends think. By the time they get to high school, most teenagers also have coaches, admissions counselors, and parents with a seemingly endless supply of expectations to conform and comply, all at a time when they should be exploring their uniqueness and solidifying their own value system.
It is no wonder that so many teens feel confused, resentful, anxious and insecure.
What They SHOULD Be Learning
Children could and should be taught simple skills for choosing better-feeling thoughts, accessing positive emotions, understanding the relationship between their minds and their bodies, and engaging in behavior that serves them.
If teenagers were taught basic resiliency skills, they would be far more likely to thrive in their personal, academic and extracurricular lives. They would have healthy relationships, healthy bodies, and healthy minds. They would trust themselves to make good decisions and be inspired about their futures.
What Can We Do?
It doesn’t happen in schools, so it needs to happen at home. If parents learn basic resilience skills, which are founded in self-awareness and emotional intelligence, they can model and teach these skills to their kids, and everyone's lives will improve.
3 Tips for Starting Conversations with Your Children
The conversation is the backbone of the relationship you have with your children. If your conversations are strong, so are your relationships. This goes for any conversation—whether it is with your spouse, your sister, your friend, or your boss. It is particularly true in the parent/child relationship. After all, your children are looking to you as their model for building paradigms about the world and their role in it.
When and how you start conversations is important. Here are our three top tips for starting conversations.
Start conversations during shoulder-to-shoulder activities
Look for openings—even seemingly random ones
Keep it short, and revisit it
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