Resilience

Developing resilience is one the principal targets of Let’s Talk. Not the false resilience that most children parrot back to their teachers – we have all heard it, some version of “never giving up” – but the real resilience, where we acknowledge that most days are difficult but it is actually the challenges that make life fun, exciting and worthwhile.

The problem with the teaching of resilience is that actually, schools have never really taught it. We talk about, yes, we might even give some examples of it happening but we rarely break resilience down into a collection of tools that can be used to tackle challenging moments. Let’s Talk does this (see Term 1) and provides a good start for resilience building but we have always struggled to find a conceptual image to make children realise that problems and challenges are a good thing for personal development. That was until we introduced kintsugi to the children in class this week.

​Kintsugi is the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery by mending the areas of breakage with lacquer mixed with powdered gold, silver, or platinum.

Kintsugi makes something new from a broken pot, which is transformed to possess a different sort of beauty. The imperfection, the golden cracks, are what make the new object unique. They are there every time you look at it and they remind us of the challenge that has been overcome.

Of course, this image will not turn your children into masters of resilience overnight but what it will do is remind them that we all face challenges and that usually these challenges are good for us, which is a vital first step in the journey to resilient behaviour.