The Resilience Formula

I was fortunate enough to attend NYS PTA's Summer Leadership Conference where I participated in a couple of highly informative workshops. I was inspired to purchase some reading material and have started going through it. Donna M. Volpitta, a former teacher and neuroscience researcher, spoke about the interactions within the brain that help govern behavior. The book she co-authored with Joel D. Haber, The Resilience Formual: A Guide to Proactive Not Reactive Parenting, is a text for parents, especially those of young children, to help them understand how the brain governs behavior and how scripting  can be used to circumvent challenges and teach prosocial behavior.

Early in the book she describes resilience "as the ability to respond postively to adverse sitruations, typically those that arise to such proportions as natural disasters, war, or crippling accidents" (p. 18). Since none of us want to contemplate the rare occurences of such large scale disasters, she also includes a broader definition of "encompassing a person's ability to cope with any stress or adversity" (p. 18), Truly this is what we want for our children- to successfully mange the day to day challenges of our life. My favorite definition of self-esteem is around the ability to have resilience- to cope with the ups and downs of our lives. We all have them. We all must respond to them. We all handle some better than others. Wouldn't we all like to have strategies to handle them better than we do?

Scripting is the process of providing the language required to help someone manage a situation. I remember an actor who played a thoughtful and loving father on TV say how he was a great TV dad becuase someone wrote it for him and he would love to have someone do that in real life when he was challenged by his own children. I suspect learning the scripts for his show probably helped him handle his kids because he was able to see a best case senario. As kids get older the scripting we must use is not in the heat of the moment, but outside it. The authors share that the three big themes of prosocial interation are

1. how to actively include people
2. how to share objects
3. how to make compromises

We might help script how to make a phone call to invite a friend to a play date, how to include a sibling in an activity, how to share a game system or toy or how to negotiate getting the car or which treat to have. Teaching children, especially from a young age to  do the following:
     Child (whines): I want to play with Davie.
     Adult: Say, "Davie, can I play with you?"
     Child: Davie, can I play with you?
     Davie: Sure
It gives them the words that they do not yet have to achieve the ends they want. It takes time and the demand that the entire request be repeated to create the neuro pathways to establish and maintain the pattern.

As a parent of a child on the spectrum, the prosocial chapter was particularly meaningful. It reminds me of Social Thinking lite. Teaching these scripts is what we did to try and develop pragmatic skills in my child with a particular weakness. It is, however, a skill that all children can benefit from.

The book is an easy read. It's advice is straigh-forward. A great gift for a new parent who does not want their child to be living in their basement when the child is 30. More information may be found at the Center for Resilinect Leadership.