By Paul E. Skidmore III, Hillsborough County, FL
The Moment After the Loss
Every parent knows the moment. The game ends, the shot misses, the team loses, and your kid’s face falls apart in the car on the way home. The easy thing to do is jump in and fix it. Tell them the ref was wrong, tell them they were the best player out there anyway, tell them it does not matter. I get the instinct. But I have learned that moment is not a problem to solve. It is a chance to teach something that will matter a lot longer than the score of one game.
Resilience is not something a kid is born with. It gets built, one small moment at a time, usually in ways that look like nothing special from the outside.
Sports Give You the Reps
I grew up engulfed in sports, and one thing I have noticed with my own kids is that sports give you reps at failing in front of people, over and over, in a way almost nothing else does. You strike out with the bases loaded. You miss the free throw. You get benched. Then you have to walk back to the dugout or the sideline and figure out what you do next.
What I try to do is not rush past that part. I ask questions instead of handing over answers. What do you think happened? What would you try differently next time? That is a different conversation than telling them it is fine or telling them what they did wrong. It puts the thinking back on them, which is where resilience actually gets built.
Responsibility at Home Does the Same Job
Sports are not the only place this happens, and honestly they should not be the only place. Chores, homework, keeping track of their own stuff, these are smaller and quieter, but they work the same muscle. A kid who forgets their homework and has to deal with the consequence at school is learning the same lesson as a kid who loses a game. The world does not always cushion you, and figuring out how to handle that early matters more than people give it credit for.
I try to let natural consequences do some of the teaching instead of always stepping in first. It is uncomfortable. Watching your kid struggle is uncomfortable. But protecting them from every hard moment does not prepare them for the next one.
Letting Them Struggle a Little
This is the part that is hardest for me, honestly. I want to fix things. I want to make the hard thing go away. But every time I let a struggle play out instead of jumping in, I watch my kids come out the other side a little more capable than before. That does not mean standing back and doing nothing. It means being present without taking over.
It Does Not Look the Same for Every Kid
One of my children is autistic, and that has taught me that resilience does not look identical for every kid. I have had to learn more about autism just to understand what a hard moment looks like for him versus what it looks like for his siblings, and what kind of support actually helps versus what gets in the way. The goal is the same across all my kids, which is helping them get back up after something goes wrong, but the path there is not one size fits all. Paying attention to each kid, instead of applying one method evenly, has taught me more than any book could.
What I Keep Coming Back To
None of this is about never losing or never struggling. It is about what happens right after. I measure a lot of this by small, specific moments, not by some big lesson delivered all at once. Did my kid handle a hard moment a little better this time than last time? That is usually the only marker I need.
Kids are watching how the adults around them handle setbacks too. I am not perfect at this, and I do not pretend to be. But I try to let my kids see me work through a hard day instead of hiding it from them, because that is its own kind of lesson. Resilience is not a speech you give once. It is something you build next to them, one ordinary day at a time.