Kim John Payne - Emotionally Resilient Tweens and Teens: Empowering Your Kids to Navigate Bullying, Teasing, and Social Exclusion

Our greatest wish for our children is that they will be okay. When they are hurt or excluded by other kids, we feel our family foundation lurch. Teasing, social exclusion, and bullying strike at the core of our family identity, awakening our primal urge to protect them. That is why any solution needs to involve the whole family.

Here in Emotionally Resilient Tweens and Teens, you will find the tools you need to help your child. You will also learn how to avoid fighting your kids battles for them. Because when you attempt to solve their problems for them, you unintentionally block their pathway to personal growth. Better, instead, to stand behind and beside them; and to avoid getting frustrated, overreacting, and angrily calling their school, which inevitably embarrasses them and causes them to stop telling you about what is really going on.

The first four chapters of Emotionally Resilient Tweens and Teens offer you specific, practical advice on how to handle your own reactions when you learn that your child, tween, or teen is excluded or bullied, whether in person or online. You will also learn how to support them through this difficult situation in a way that builds family connection and trust, and, most importantly, helps them develop I can do this self-confidence.

When we were young, few of us ever experienced anything close to the frenzied pace of life, competing demands, and heightened expectations that our children face every day. Though we can certainly help reduce some of the pressures our children encounter, others are hardwired into modern living. That is why we hear terms such as resiliency so often these days. Our kids, we are told, need to develop the inner fortitude to bounce back, learn from whats happened, and move on without a significant loss of confidence.

The aim of Emotionally Resilient Tweens and Teens is to help you understand how to better support your child to make a behavioral course correction while their social challenges are still moderate.

But what exactly is emotional resilience? A good way to sharpen our understanding is to juxtapose its characteristics with trauma responses as laid out in the chart below:

Sincere thanks to Dr. Dee Joy Coulter, whose work was the basis for this chart.

Stories are the language of childhood. Children learn from them and empathize with them. Thats why stories have been so effective in helping to heal social wounds. Starting with chapter 5, you will find ten stories that help teach our children how to shape their reactions and minimize their vulnerability. Targeted kids need to understand that they cant make bullies stop, because attempting to do that just hands the bullies more control. But they can learn how to stand their ground and take back power by controlling their own responses. That way they can influence a difficult situation rather than passively accept what is happening.

In essence, Emotionally Resilient Tweens and Teens is a toolbox that leads to the development of empathy, promotes problem-solving, and provides hope during your childs socially crucial elementary- and middle-school years.

The subtle but clear messages in these stories will teach your kids how to navigate their own way out of challenging social situations. They will identify with the characters struggles and realize, Oh, its not just me. Others like me have gone through this and found ways to deal with it. If they are okay, I can be too.

Parents who read Emotionally Resilient Tweens and Teens will better understand what their kids are up against and learn how to coach them through the social landmines of their developing world. After you have read these stories yourself, sit down with your elementary- or middle-school child and read together about the trials, tribulations, and eventual triumphs of their peers. Then you can team up to devise effective ways to handle the teasing, social exclusion, or bullying that they encounter.