Building Resilience in our Youth

Have you seen this last month how you or your youth could either use more resilience or how you developed more resilience?  

Remember, we focused on modeling good coping skills? (see article)  It's funny how our subconscious can work on a problem that we put in front of it because--looking back--I can see how much of my personal development centered around modeling good coping skills!  Wow! 

I found connections with what we were studying this month in our Vanguard group (patterns to keep and discard as part of our education) and really spent a lot of time evaluating how I respond to things.  This actually led to a deeper, cleansing look at years' old default pathways that have been behind some of my negative coping "displays."  It is ongoing, but has had a good beginning.

I would love to hear your own insights and experiences when thinking about and applying our challenge to model good coping skills for our youth!

Next challenge!
So here is the challenge for this month...

2. Praise effort, not just success. Children should understand that success is a product of hard work and sacrifice. But even when they try hard, sometimes they’ll fail. Commend your children for trying, then encourage them to figure out what’s going wrong and to try another approach or practice more. Celebrate small steps in the right direction.

To start off, please include in the comment section below or on the Facebook Vanguard page advice you may have for us going into this month: articles, personal experiences, books, talks, etc.

Let's synergize as we focus on this for the month! 

Avoiding the "Cobra Effect" in Parenting and Mentoring

Resilience.

Who doesn't want that for their child? In fact "the lack of resilience" may be recognized as one of the leading problems with today's youth as they leave the home.  

I would like to use the article, "Resilience—Spiritual Armor for Today’s Youth"
by Lynn G. Robbins, as the jumping place for a discussion to take place monthly over the course of the next year to help us apply this to our Vanguard Group methods and our home.  Although it is from literature published by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, I feel the principles are universal and look forward to respectful feedback and discussion referencing sources and experiences from many different world views.  To have capable and empowered youth for the future is everyone's concern.

The starts with this analogy:

The story is told that during British rule of colonial India, an unacceptable number of venomous cobras lived in and around Delhi. To solve the problem, local authorities began paying a bounty for dead cobras. The ill-advised bounty backfired when enterprising locals began breeding cobras for profit. When the bounty ended, the breeders set the cobras free, further compounding the problem.
The phenomenon of unintended consequences sometimes causing more harm than intended benefits is known as the “cobra effect.”

 The article is meaningful and had a profound effect on my parenting paradigm already when I went running this morning with my 6 year old biking along.

I had a different approach to how I interacted with him.  I carefully explained why I was riding on the road in certain places, how it was safe for me to be on the road at times because I could recognize the patterns of traffic and how I  could be seen because I was bigger.  I gave him the opportunity to travel behind me or to stay on the sidewalk, giving him choices that he could act on according to his comfort after being mindful of the dangers of the different options.  Both options were safe, but it gave him the chance to face them on his own terms.  I explained more to him the principles behind my choices rather than just demanding obedience and compliance as is so easily my default.  
It was a good experience!


I would like to invite you to read the article (pretty quick read) and then we will use the following article with it's 8 points as a center for our discussion this year.  I would like to invite you to comment below or ask for author permission and I will have you post an article on this blog. You can also do it on our FB group.

The first tip for helping our youth develop resilience is:

1. Model good coping skills. Teach by example. When your own emotions are high, say things like, “I can tell I’m getting frustrated. So, I’m going to take a deep breath (or pray, or take a little walk, etc.) before I try again.” Or, “I’m sorry I got angry. I need to try again.”

Just starting with this question on my mind as I studied my core book this morning, I found 13 different principles to help me personally avoid "the cobra effect":
1.Take upon us responsibility for our areas of stewardship and actions
2. Act with soberness (and not just the non-alcoholic kind :D)
3. Come into the temple (or place of personal highest worship or communion with God)
4. Be diligent
5. Recognize personal weaknesses
6. Seek help of Creator to recognize struggles in others
7. Have courage to recognize virtue 
8. Know which tools that are at our disposal to use
9. Just because we have great resources or "riches"-- don't be prideful!
10. Don't make excuses
11. Honor male/female roles
12. Be mindful of your example
13. We are responsible to seek and know truth so we can help those in our stewardship

I look forward to reading your thoughts this month as you think about how we can better model good coping skills!

Up and Going Again!

After a few years of deep healing and readjusting to homeschooling in a bubble, I am excited to move forward with making this blog a better resource for mentors! I will be posting videos and links that people put on our facebook group as well as videos that I and other mentors produce.

Also, don't hesitate to revisit old discussions! I guarantee that the topics will still be relevant and helpful.  For instance, I chanced across this old blog created to help with a 2014 training in Utah.  The articles had great insights and resources to revitalize how I look at our methods!

Please email me or FB message me with particular questions, videos or articles you would like to see published or produced to help with your group.

I am also starting an online Vanguard group that people can join if they want to reply below or FB message me.  Your family can start at any time; I will just ask that you do the preliminary exercises to get your family mentally ready to join us :D. 
Online Vanguard Group link

For now, I am going to start an ongoing discussion for the new year, so check out the next article on this blog.

For those who feel short on time here is a kick-off video that includes:
-a Core and Crust of Leadership/Vanguard Sun activity suggestion for students and mentors (link)
-a few thoughts on the "Cobra Effect" (see next article)
-desire to start off a discussion group for parents/mentors

(I just listened to it and it goes way too fast, so I will slow down when I video in the future...I was just so excited to get these ideas out there!)