Practical Ways To Raise Resilient Young People

Most of us say we want confident tweens and teens, but we often try to give them confidence by removing the very moments that create it. I take a bold look at resilience building for young people through the lens of nervous system wiring, everyday parenting choices, and one unforgettable example: a Brazilian initiation ritual involving bullet ants. Extreme, yes, but it makes the point crystal clear. A community signals, “You can do hard things, and you belong while you do them.”

From there, I unpack a tricky edge of gentle parenting. Naming emotions and building emotional literacy helps children feel safe and seen, yet we can miss the mark when we work too hard to protect them from disappointment, sadness, or social discomfort. Resilience is built in that exact territory. When we allow avoidance, a teen’s nervous system can learn that challenge is danger, whether that’s a difficult conversation, a new club, a camp, or walking into a room without friends.

We then get practical. I share micro ways to build resilience and teen confidence without grand stunts: ordering at a restaurant, paying for something themselves, asking the question, speaking up, taking the small role in assembly, and showing up even when it feels edgy. I also explain the elastic band model: stretch capacity without breaking it, using just enough stress for growth and enough support for safety.

If you want calmer, braver young people and you want to feel steadier as the adult beside them, press play. Subscribe, share with someone raising teens, and leave a review so more people can find their way back to their body.

Transcript

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Welcome And Why This Matters

Naomi Mills 0:41

Welcome to episode 38 of the You Are the Answer podcast. I'm so delighted that you're here. We are talking all things tween teen families. But even if you are not a parent or you're raising young people in that age group anymore, this is still going to be really relevant for you because what I love as an adult is you can listen to information like this and then start to see some really interesting parallels with your own life. It helps you understand how your wiring became, how it was, which then helps with that understanding of why your body and brain operates how it does. So there is something in this for all of us.

Bullet Ants And Rite Of Passage

Naomi Mills 1:25

And I'd like to ask you, how would you feel if you were growing up in an Amazonian tribe in Brazil? Now I'm not going to try and pronounce the name of the particular tribe because I will not do it any justice. But there is a tribe in Brazil that have a traditional initiation ritual involving bullet ants. And you might have seen it like I did on a natural history documentary. And in the ceremony, young children are asked to put mitts on their hands that are filled with these bullet ants that bite. And it's a really significant cultural event where they mark the transition from childhood to adulthood within their community. And for them, it's not just about demonstrating endurance and spiritual strength, but what it shows to the tribe is that this individual, this young person, has enough resilience and readiness to take on the responsibilities of adulthood within that tribe. And it's very deeply rooted in their heritage. And you know, I could, as a caraburcher, I get all interested in the fact or these ideas that because this is something that happens generation generationally, these children's bodies actually, while it's still incredibly painful and difficult for them to endure, they also are born with a level of ability to deal with the bullet ants bite and their venom. And as I saw in the documentary, if you're a middle-aged white man from the UK that does it, like he reacted horrifically because his body's never had that antigen in it. But it's a really extreme but important for me example of where resilience and resilience training as part of growing up is a very important part of helping transition our young people into adulthood.

When Gentle Parenting Avoids Pain

Naomi Mills 3:48

And without desiring to be deeply controversial, my personal interpretation of gentle parenting is that in gentle parenting, we can see and acknowledge and verbalize a child's emotion and help them become more emotionally literate. And we absolutely want to do that. But where gentle parenting can miss its mark is where it goes into trying to do everything we can to avoid our children feeling disappointment, sadness, pain, or suffering. Because that's where resilience is made. One of my favorite quotes, which comes from Gwen and Glenn and Doyle actually, about parenting is our job is not to teach our children how to avoid the fire, but how to walk through it. And that just speaks so deeply to me on a personal level and on a professional level, because I see so many young children struggling to find resilience. Now, the last couple of episodes we talked about perfectionism. So there's a big cultural and mental reason why our children are already feeling not good enough. And we talked about ways as parents or colleagues or friends of young people, ways that we can highlight their worthiness and their worth that's completely outside of perfectionism to help kind of balance that out.

Confidence Is The Reward

Naomi Mills 5:24

But what does come first? You feeling confident or doing the scary thing? Because I think so many of us have been taught that one day we're gonna wake up feeling enough or feeling confident enough. But I would suggest that confidence isn't where resilience starts, and that resilience really starts in experience and the understanding that we can do something that seems painful and terrifying and awful and get through it anyway, like those young children who have to, and they must know it's coming up, right? Your next year or whenever it is, you're gonna be putting your hand in that mitt, and it's going to be painful. And I think it's can be 10 minutes or more. You know, you've watched other generations do it, and there's a key in that too, isn't there? When you witness other people overcoming something that's scary and hard and painful, that can be a nice way into resilience as well. But confidence is really the reward of resilience, but not the requirement. Because as a young person, they'll often think a child will think, when I feel brave, I'll do the hard thing. But we don't often feel brave before we've done it. Because the reality is you do something that feels really scary and hard, and your nervous system learns I survived it, and confidence is then built as the result. If we then allow our children to avoid something that feels hard or difficult or scary, their nervous system may then learn, well, a difficult conversation is dangerous. Walking into a room or a school camp where I don't have any friends, or walking into a new space, or starting a new group or club where I don't already have my best friends in it is dangerous. And then, of course, your nervous system just wants you to be safe. So it's going to do everything it can to make you feel like we just need to avoid that. But if we can find ways to gently practice building resilience with our young people that feel maybe slightly lower risk in the beginning, but in reality, as a parent these days, you've really got to push and push in a very loving but strong way, but in a way that gives your child no wiggle room to avoid what you know is going to be a safe way for them to learn some resilience and some challenge and come out of it unscathed. That is a really tricky balance. So you will know if you've listened back to one of my previous episodes about firewalking and how much I love walking on fire as a way of teaching people resilience that you can do something that your brain tells you is absolutely impossible. And we have children that walk over the fire, like we said, back to the key of them witnessing resilience, even having them come along to watch their parents walk can be very empowering for them. I've done glass walks, walking over beds of broken glass with young children. We've done arrow breaks, and this is all teaching them resilience. So it's my kind of westernized version of the hand in the ant gloves.

Micro Bravery In Everyday Moments

Naomi Mills 9:10

And I'm also going to talk a little bit about speaking and sharing, because funnily enough, I can sometimes find with some groups the children can't wait to walk over broken glass because also when you're a child, you have low kind of levels of what's going to keep like low safety awareness, and that's why they leap off things and jump over things and run into things quite easily. But then if you say go and talk to this person or go and ask this question, they're like public speaking, you know. So resilience comes not just to the grand things but also the miniature moments. One of the things I particularly like to do with my child is encouraging them to order a restaurant, giving them their own physical money to go and buy something. If you want it, go buy it. Or you want another drink, go and get it. In foreign countries as well, and she will do it because she wants whatever it is that she wants. And you're like, yep, but you have to do it. And these are just tiny micro ways that you are socially giving your child opportunities to learn that something that might feel socially a little bit edgy is absolutely fine. And the same thing happens, you know. Remember when they're first learning to ride a bike or their first exam, or maybe it's their first driving lesson, or the first time they have to speak in front of their class, encouraging them to take part in the school assembly or to perform some tiny aspect of the school show or drama, whether they want to or not, because we understand that micro little steps of discomfort are very important at building resilience. And so we're always doing this dance with the nervous system between what feels safe and comfortable, but also what is expansive.

Stretch The Band Without Breaking

Naomi Mills 11:08

And a friend of mine who's done quite a bit of work in this area explained it to me in a really brilliant way, which was that if you think of your child and even yourself, it's for all of us humans, but we're thinking about teens here. Think of this elastic band, okay, which is their capacity to build resilience. And you want to stretch that band, but you don't want to break it, which is why the answer for your child is going to be unique to your child. But micro steps are important for everybody. And maybe your child's a massive, like an extroverted performer, and that's really comfortable, but there will be other things that feel uncomfortable for them, and that's what you will gently and encouragingly invite them to do. Because remember, even though we talk about stress being the challenge of the nervous system, which too much stress too consistently can push us into fight, flight, and leave us locked there, which is not how we want to live. Stress is also completely essential for building resilience and capacity within our nervous system. So that's why life in human beings are not simple and straightforward. Your nervous system needs just the right amount of challenge. Because where we don't have any, we don't get any growth. And you can actually almost push your nervous system into that avoidant fear response if you don't consistently give yourself a nudge to do something that feels a little bit outside your comfort zone. And it's the same whether you're a child, a teenager, or you're an adult, it just looks different at each point of your life. But where there's too much challenge, too much pushing, there becomes overwhelm. And so our growth happens in the middle, in that stretch, so that we have just enough strain on our system to make that elastic band that bit stretchier the next time.

Stop Rescuing Too Soon

Naomi Mills 13:09

Now, as adults, we can sometimes make this harder for our children because, of course, we love them. We want our instinct is 100% to protect them. And so we cannot unconsciously rescue our small person too quickly. We can try and resolve problems for them rather than with them. We can try and solve disagreements or become angered ourselves when they're challenged, especially socially or physically. And of course, that's a very natural response. But resilience, remember, isn't built by removing their obstacles. We're not teaching them to avoid the fire. We have to teach them to walk through the fire. The biggest gift we can give as an adult to a young person's nervous system is that you can handle this. And I am here if you need me. I am here to support you through the fire, not to take it away from you. And I just want you to think back to when you were learning to ride a bike or teaching your young person to ride a bike. You have to let them wobble. And those first couple of times, if you were the kid on the bike wobbling the first time your parents let go, there is a deep instinct, isn't there, to be like, oh, I can't do this, or you think you're gonna fall off. And then something kicks in and you're cycling and it feels blooming amazing. You need to discover that you can balance. You need to discover that you can build your own resilience. And of course, as a parent, you're teaching your child to ride a bike and you let go too early and they crash, or they push it too far or too fast, as we all inevitably do, and we come off our bikes and we hurt ourselves. That's okay too, because you were there, you know, to show up for them, to nurse them back to health and let them go again. So as a parent, we want to sit in that space between not rescuing and not pushing too hard either, but guiding with consistent support. And that's so important for building resilience in our young person's nervous systems, and that is why the whole central nervous system, which is of course responsible for how your child is going to be wired in this world and how they're going to interact with everything around them, their health and their achievements and their quality of life. So it's important stuff, but it's not simple stuff, and it needs just the right amount of pushing and growth to build resilience, which is then met with safety, calm, and reassurance. And we're not always going to get it right. But what we can always do is keep showing up with love and trust and connection. But we really have to remember that resilience building in children is a key to creating their success as well.

Closing Thoughts And Next Steps

Naomi Mills 16:20

Thank you for joining me on You Are the Answer. If today's episode sparked something in you, share it with someone you care about and leave a review to help others find their way back to their body too. For more tools, inspiration, and resources to support your journey, head to www.uareanswer.co.uk. And until next time, stay connected, stay curious, and remember, you are the answer, and you always have been.