-- The importance of stumbling in building resiliency --

As parents, you want the best for your child; to provide opportunities to maximize their potential; and to set them up for happiness and success in all their endeavors.  Parents naturally want to protect their children from disaster, danger, and disappointment. However, as with most things, too much protection can become a problem.

A large body of research, and common sense, has demonstrated that childhoods marked by trauma and extreme adversity have a negative impact on children’s development. These early life experiences can lead to changes in brain development that can have lasting effects on cognitive and emotional development. These changes can lead to a hyper-activation of the stress response system such that children are at greater risk for a plethora of later psychological and medical problems.
 
What may be less obvious is the finding that children who are raised in environments with extreme levels of support and nurturing are also at risk for similar problems, particularly in heightened physiological reactions to later stressors and adversity.
 
The reason for this may be akin to how the body builds its immune system. As infants and children mature, they are exposed to all sorts of germs that train the immune system to effectively respond to later encounters with the same or similar threats.
 
The same principle appears to hold true for the brain when learning how to respond to psychological stressors. Essentially, children need to be exposed to some level of stress and adversity across development to inoculate them against future stress.
 
The main idea is that by experiencing a variety of successes and disappointments throughout development, children learn a wide array of coping strategies, and their stress response system becomes flexible and efficient. Success in facing controllable stressors can help cement effective responses, whereas periodic experiences of less controllable, novel stressors that cannot be overcome can help extinguish maladaptive patterns of coping. In other words, to become flexible, adaptive problem solvers who persist in the face of challenge, children need to experience opportunities for success as well as “failures.” As adults, these children are well set up to cope with modern life, which for most, is neither extremely threatening nor entirely devoid of stress and disappointment.