How Does Resilience Look at Five?

My daughter is back home from school.

She has had a rather rough day. I can tell.

I give her a glass of water and ask her “How was school?”

She doesn’t want to talk.

She doesn’t want to take off her shoes.

She doesn’t want to eat.

And she doesn’t want to change.

I ask her, “What happened?”

After the usual meltdown that comes with being five, she finally tells me,

“Aai, I couldn’t dribble at school today during Basketball. I tried so many times. I DON’T LIKE THIS!!!!.”

I can sense it.

She is angry.

She is upset.

She is hurt.

Not with anyone else.

With herself.

Because she couldn’t get it right.

I hug her and calmly ask her, “What will make you feel better?”

There is long silence, restlessness and anger…

“Where is my basketball?” she asks.

“In your cupboard,” I tell her.

She walks to her cupboard, still wearing her shoes,

She takes out the ball and starts practising.

And she practises.

For one whole hour.

I sit patiently, though, honestly, I am a little annoyed.

Her shoes are still on, Inside the house. Lunch is waiting.

And there are a hundred things I think she should be doing instead.

But I wait…

And then I see it.

That smile.

“I GOT IT!!! I can do it Aai!! I can dribble!”

And in that moment, I realise something.

This is resilience.

Not something I taught her.

Not something I explained to her.

Not something I asked her to practise.

She felt disappointed.

She allowed herself to feel it.

She found what she needed.

And then she tried.

Again.

And again.

And again.

Until she got it.

If I had stopped her that day and asked her to change first, have lunch or insisted that she take off her shoes,

she might have missed a much bigger lesson.

A lesson that she taught herself.

Maybe resilience at five doesn’t look like what we expect it to look like.

Maybe sometimes it looks like a little girl in her school shoes, practising basketball in the middle of the afternoon, with tears and frustration still somewhere inside her…

until suddenly she looks up and says,

“I GOT IT!”

And perhaps our job as parents isn’t always to fix the problem, teach the lesson or make the moment easier.

Sometimes, it’s simply to make space for the child to find her own way through it.