This Is The Truth About Resilience In Teens

Whether you like it or not, teens are the most resilient people you will ever meet.

Everywhere we look there are medias portraying teens as a hormonal mess. They are always crying, getting angry if they don’t get there way, trying to rebel against there parents. And while parents get busy trying to teach us that the media is fake, they fail to teach themselves. And that can become completely detrimental.

Believe it or not, we can understand the difficulty of a situation and we don’t plan on becoming overwhelmed by it. Everybody has a different threshold for what they can cope with. The best way I have seen someone describe it is by imagining there are 2 glasses. On is a small glass and the other is a large glass. if you pour 15ml of water into both of them they both have the same amount of water in them, right? But when you look at them, you can see that the smaller glass has less space for more water, even though they have the same amount of water in them. Now say this water is a metaphor for stress, and the glass is a metaphor for a person. Each person is able to handle different amounts of stress. So this means, if you give someone a whole lot of chores and they can do them, don’t expect to give someone else the same amount of chores without a different reaction. You want to make sure you know their capacity so that their ‘glass’ doesn’t overflow.

And can I tell you something, it is OK to overflow. And by that I mean, it is OK to be overwhelmed and emotional because that is just who you are. In my opinion, I respect people who show there emotions. It is so hard to do that and whenever you do you are showing people that you may be the ‘small glass’ and then they can help you by taking some of the stress out. You shouldn’t be criticized for how much or how little you can handle because you never really had a say in that

Resilience, in my opinion, is about how you finish a situation. It isn’t about what happens during it, or at the start of it, because you could cry and shout and have a difficult time in the middle but then in the end you get it done. Maybe it just took a little longer for you, but there is no timer set on it. Eventually everything is finished and nobody cares what happened during it. If anything, that shows more strength because you could carry on. You could have easily quit, but you didn’t and I am proud of you for that.

I think that by telling people to ‘be more resilient’ or to ‘get used to it’, you are leading them down the wrong path. You are basically telling them to bottle up their emotions and to stop being inconvenient. Although you think you are trying to prepare them for the real world, they are perceiving your ‘advice’ in this way. Instead, you should say, ‘how can I help you manage your stress’ and ‘lets take a break and figure out what we can do to help’. Just put yourself in their shoes because whenever you get stressed it never helps when you have a patronizing person shouting in your ear.

Just remember that teens have so much going on in their life that they could be a ‘large glass’ but just filled up with a lot of water all the time. If someone is crying it means that they have been strong for too long and you need to let them feel those emotions. Don’t bug them for how they feel because they will feel as though nobody else feels the way they do, which isn’t true. Stick together and be kind to one another PERIODT.