Summary
More children are struggling to cope with small setbacks in school.
Mistakes feel overwhelming. Frustration escalates quickly. And learning grinds to a halt.
In this episode of School Behaviour Secrets, we explore why this isn’t about children being “less resilient" - and why common advice like “push through" or “try harder" often makes things worse.
You’ll learn how modern home and school environments have reduced children’s opportunities to practise coping with difficulty - and what that means for behaviour, learning and staff workload.
You’ll discover:
- What resilience really is (and what it isn’t).
- Why a packed curriculum and over-scaffolding can unintentionally undermine coping skills.
- The difference between resilience and grit - and where grit is often misunderstood.
- 4 practical classroom strategies to help children stay engaged when learning feels hard.
- How to support emotional regulation without removing challenge.
This episode is for teachers, SENCOs and school leaders who want to build genuine resilience in children - without blame, pressure or unrealistic expectations.
Important links:
Get your FREE Beacon School Support guide to helping children manage their strong emotions
Get our FREE SEND Behaviour Handbook: https://beaconschoolsupport.co.uk/send-handbook
Download other FREE behaviour resources for use in school: https://beaconschoolsupport.co.uk/resources.php
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Show notes / transcription
Have you noticed how many children now fall apart over really small things, like making a mistake in their work, or an unexpected delay in class, or just being told to wait, or not getting their work right the first time? It can feel like resilience, something kids are supposed to learn naturally at school and at home, is in increasingly short supply right now.
And that's why in this episode I'm going to show you why children haven't become weaker, and why telling them to try harder or just push through it often makes very little difference. My name's Simon Currigan, and I've spent the last 20 years working inside schools, supporting teachers and school leaders with behaviour and SEMH. And by the end of today's episode, you'll understand exactly what resilience is, why we're seeing less of it in our classrooms and our homes, and more importantly, what you can change—strategies that you can use to help children cope with frustration, stay engaged when learning feels hard, and recover when things don't go their way.
Let's get into it.
Hi there. Welcome to School Behaviour Secrets. My name's Simon Currigan, and my spirit animal is a woodpecker called Professor Augustus Barclay Yaffle from the children's TV series Bagpuss. That guy had some serious woodpecking energy. Today's episode is about resilience. And in the spirit of that topic—and I might regret this—I've decided to test my own resilience by recording this entire episode with no edits at all. No cutting out mistakes. No smoothing things out. If I stumble over words, it's going to stay in this episode. If I lose my train of thought and wander away from my episode plan, and I can't get back to the main thread of the show, that will stay too. So you're getting the raw, unfiltered version of the show, which involves a lot more swearing than you're probably used to. But don't worry, we'll bleep that out if it happens, especially importantly if you've got kids around you. And then you can see what my resilience is like under pressure, which already feels uncomfortable, so that's promising. And it'll also break the illusions any of you might be under that I just rock up to the microphone and nail these recordings first time, so be gentle with me. But before we get started, and I promise this will only take a moment, if you found this podcast useful, it would really help if you could hit the subscribe button. And if you've got 30 seconds spare, that's all it takes. Please leave us a quick rating or review wherever you listen. It helps more teachers and school leaders find the podcast, and it keeps this show free. So thank you genuinely.
Okay, resilience. I want to start by talking about what we're seeing in schools right now. That's our team who are going out and working in real schools are seeing supporting teachers and pupils in the real world, and from what people write in and tell me about the children they're working with. And that kind of summed up sounds like this: more children are struggling to cope with small setbacks, not big setbacks. More kids are overreacting and getting frustrated over small things. And people are seeing things like kids tearing up or shutting down or blowing up when something doesn't go right first time. What we're talking about here is not the big stuff, but overreacting to everyday things. Someone can't find a pencil, or someone makes a spelling mistake, or someone's just asked to wait in a line, or they weren't picked first for an activity or something like that.
The thing is, when they overreact, the impact then isn't just on that individual child. It's the impact they have on learning time and lesson flow. Because then you have to mop up all of that and deal with their emotions. And that has an impact on your energy levels because it's stressful as the adult dealing with kids' emotions all day. And if you're always waiting for the next explosion, then you can feel like you're treading on eggshells. And what you see is—and this is kind of dangerous actually—kids in class who are starting to tell themselves stories to explain their behaviours. And you hear them sounding—hear them sounding—there you go. There's the first mistake of the podcast. You hear them saying things like, "I can't cope. I'm bad at this. I need help straight away." And I'm already feeling like I need help with the words to this podcast.
But the thing is, kids today are no different to the kids from 20 years ago, or 40 years ago, or 100 years ago. Biologically, they are exactly the same. You should be able to take, in a time travel machine, a caveman or a caveman's child from 50,000 years ago, shave them because, you know, cavemen children were obviously hairy too, shove them in a uniform, and they would perform exactly the same as their modern peers. They would be indistinguishable from the other children in class because, in evolutionary terms, we haven't changed that much. So the question I want to explore today isn't why are children less resilient, because that's not quite true. It's this: what have we changed in the way we bring up children at home and at school that means they're not developing resilience? That's making resilience harder for them to build, like a muscle at the gym that improves through working it hard.
And a quick note ahead of time: in this episode, I am going to put aside the factors of neurodiversity and conditions like RSD, rejection-sensitive dysmorphia, to one side. We've sort of covered them loads in other episodes, so I'm going to go much bigger picture on this one rather than focus on different types of sort of specific needs. So just that sort of, oh, caveat upfront. So let's start with what resilience actually is and what it isn't. Resilience is not what happens when we tell kids to toughen up, or we tell them just to ignore their emotions, or push through distress or discomfort, or when we expect them to be calm all of the time. And it's definitely not—it's definitely not the result of telling them, "Well, when I was at school, it was like this or that." Or there are children in other countries that have to walk 6 miles to school every day and back. So what are you complaining about?
Resilience is encouraging children or helping them develop the skills to stay engaged when something feels difficult or uncomfortable, to feel frustration because everyone feels frustrated from time to time, but without becoming overwhelmed by it. It's recovering after a wave or a hit of emotions during a setback, rather than never having those emotions at all. That's not natural to not have emotions. We all have emotions. It's what we do with them that counts. And that means resilience isn't about how children feel. So not that they never get frustrated. It's about what they do with those feelings. And that distinction really matters because it affects how we approach how we teach them resilience in school. We end up with different destinations.
So why does resilience feel harder to build in kids today compared to kids from the past? And this is where we need to be careful because I don't think we should go down the road of blaming parents or blaming teachers. I don't think that's productive. I think what we should do is look at what's different now compared to the past, and compared to the past even, and think about how our systems need to adapt to those changes in school.
So let's start with how things have changed at home. And in the media and on social media, you often hear people now saying, "It's screens. Screens are the problem. Screens are the devil." And I think the reality of screens is more nuanced than that. I don't believe it's that the screens are bad exactly when it comes to resilience anyway. But it's the way apps and games are designed on phones to hook us, to keep kids—well, I say kids, but really, we're talking about all human beings, aren't we really?—how they keep us engaged using psychological tricks to keep us using apps.
And those experiences are specifically psychologically designed to do things like remove prolonged failure or difficulty, to offer us instant retries so it doesn't feel like failure matters. They adapt difficulty automatically to the skill of the player. So it's very well calibrated so the person playing is never overly challenged or feels discomfort. And they reward effort very quickly. So we get that dopamine rush, that dopamine hit that keeps us wanting to keep playing over and over.
So when they're playing these apps, kids get fewer experiences of sitting down with something that has a bit of a learning curve to it. And they have to sit there and admit to themselves, "I'm not very good at this yet. This is going to take some time to improve at." That doesn't mean kids today are weak. It just means that their opportunities to practise sticking with difficulty have been reduced. And I believe that's like a muscle that never gets under pressure, so it never develops.
So here's a quick example off the top of my head. A child might be able to create a seemingly beautiful picture on an app on their very first try. But if you stick a real, well, paintbrush in their hand and their first experience, well, that's going to be a mess. The app removes the struggle. And kids spend so much time today on apps that it creates this false perception or this false sense of how the world is, how proficient they are in it, what the level of their real skills is.
At home as well, the same goes for adults stepping in too quickly to help kids when they experience a difficulty or something goes wrong. And that right, that usually comes out of love, right? I completely get that. I'm a parent too. We all live in the real world. But sometimes it comes from parents being under time pressure or they're just exhausted. Sometimes as parents, we all take shortcuts, right? Everyone does it. No one's perfect. But we have to be honest and say, when we remove too many obstacles from our kids, they never have a chance to experience failure. When they miss out on that learning opportunity, they miss out on something crucial. They never really have to try or struggle and then recover before they learn to succeed.
And here's something I've learned from decades in the classroom that I think a lot of people overlook. Confidence doesn't come from removing obstacles or reassuring children they can do it. It comes from evidence that they've succeeded with a difficult thing in the past. Evidence produces; it generates that confidence in the child, not the other way around. Sometimes you might have heard me in the past as well on previous episodes refer to this as the confidence-competence loop. So what we need to do is give them opportunities to see they can do difficult things, and that improves their confidence in the future, which makes them more resilient. You get this virtuous loop.
All right, I want to turn my attention now to what's changed in schools because the way we teach has massively changed in the last 30 years. And I think that has an impact on how resilient our kids have been. Schools are under enormous pressure nowadays. There are packed curriculums and timetables, and teachers are under pressure to produce endless accountability and data to show that learning has moved on for their pupils in every single lesson. And there's a proof—pardon me, sorry, another mistake there. I'm testing my resilience here as we go.
There's a Peter Drucker quote, and I'm going to misquote him slightly here that goes, "What gets measured gets optimised." Which means if we're only measuring academic progress in school, if we focus only on that, then to some extent, we start disregarding other learning skills in the classroom because time is short. And if they're put to one side, what happens is, because no one's measuring it, no one really notices. So what happens in that situation? Well, teachers start scaffolding the learning so learning happens more quickly. And then they scaffold it again, and then they scaffold it some more because they have to do that to meet those targets and develop and show data around productivity.
And the unintended consequence of that, children experience less trial and error, less struggle because there's just no time for it, less ambiguity, which they need to learn to manage in the real world. And adults get very good, understandably, at stepping in early when learning stalls to keep things moving. So we end up with classrooms that are incredibly efficient in terms of learning, but sometimes that's at the cost of resilience. And that's not poor teaching. That's reacting. That's optimising for what the system currently notices and rewards.
Now, there might be some of you listening to this who are thinking about Angela Duckworth's book *Grit* here, which is a really good, really interesting book. I recommend that you read it. But I don't have time to jump into the detail of what she says in the book. What I am going to share is her definition of grit, which is persistence over time. And there's value in that idea. The problem is, grit has often been simplified into try harder. And the truth is, kids develop grit when the conditions are right for them, when they feel safe, that they're in an environment where mistakes are okay, when they feel supported, that the adult will help them overcome barriers when they've really hit a wall.
And that help could be academic or emotional from our point of view because sometimes success is as much about mindset as it is ability. They also need to feel confident that the difficulty they're experiencing is survivable, maybe even expected, and that it's not the end of the world if a problem comes up or relationships won't be broken, or we won't think less of them for failing, or they won't think less of themselves for failing. Failing? Failing. Grit isn't forcing effort. It's staying engaged because you believe you can get through it. And then you develop persistence over time.
Well, that's what resilience is and isn't. But what does that mean for our classroom practice tomorrow with the kids that we're working with? How do we actually encourage resilience? Well, here's four simple strategies for you to start using.
Strategy one: highlight regulation when it does happen because most kids do manage frustration sometimes. But what happens is when they're managing those difficulties, we tend not to notice it. We sort of skip over it and take it for granted. But there's a basic rule in the classroom that what we publicly notice, we get more of. So when you see a child hit a difficulty and they pause, and you can see them kind of rethinking their approach in their head, or they're kind of feeling tense, they do some breathing to manage their emotions, or you can see them reframing the difficulties in their head or talking it out loud. So it's not about the difficulty of the task, not about their worth as a human being, but it's just the way they're looking at the problem or their frustrations. Or they keep going. They just sort of muscle through despite being annoyed. Don't take that for granted. Walk over to them and name it. Label what they are doing with your words. In the words of the classic countdown hosts, but I don't mean countdown in this case. I've just made another mistake there. I mean, catchphrase. In the words of the classic catchphrase hosts from time past, say what you see. This isn't about saying what the child achieved at the end in terms of what their work looked like or how many they got right or wrong. But you're talking about the process that they're going through. So you go up to them and you say something like, "When you were stuck on that problem, you looked really frustrated, but you didn't give up. You showed resilience." And then in their head, what you've just done is left a log, a record that they coped under pressure that was validated by a third person.
Strategy two: prime children before you know they're going to hit a difficulty. So this is kind of pre-tutoring them how to cope, meaning before you give them a task that you know is going to be challenging, just sort of introduce a story or example of how role models they've been learning about have overcome challenge in the past. So you can say to them, "Look, you're going to find certain parts of this task difficult. So when you reach that point, what would someone you admire do when the going got tough? What mistake would they expect to make? What would help them keep going in this situation?" So this isn't like putting a motivational poster on the wall, but it is about priming them with your words in a spoken situation for difficult situations that taps into the power of role models to help get them through expected difficulties.
Strategy three: build a sense of pride by giving them opportunities to reflect because research shows that feeling proud, experiencing pride, that's linked to effort. So they think about a situation that's related to the effort they've put into something and an outcome they've achieved. When we reflect on that, that makes persistence more likely next time when we experience a problem; it will keep us pushing through to a goal. So short reflections work brilliantly for this. At the end of a lesson or a school day, all you have to do is give your students prompts to answer in a diary, something like, "Something that was hard today, but I stuck with was." And then they complete the sentence. Or, "A moment I wanted to give up today but didn't was." And then they reflect. And that reflection helps encourage pride, and that pride makes progress stick.
Strategy four: use a deliberate but supported struggle. Build difficulty into your lessons and then prime your students for it, as we've already discussed, and then stand back and wait. Let them experience difficulty and see what they do. Now, that's different from abandoning them or withdrawing support. But what we have to do is resist rescuing too early. So we use language like, you know, "This is the tricky bit," or, "You're not meant to get this bit straight away. You have to work at it." Or that frustration means your brain is working like someone working out at the gym to develop, you know, the muscle of attention or the muscle of focus, or it's the muscle developing to learn how to do four-digit addition. If children never experience manageable struggle, they never learn they can survive it. But the way I'm talking about doing it here is to purposefully and intentionally build it into specific lessons where it's properly signposted. And we have to then expect, as teaching professionals, that that is going to slow the lesson down a bit. And while the academic outcomes might be slightly less than we would desire today, the payback that comes down the line when our students do develop resilience so they can stick with harder problems in the future. I saw this in the Year Six SATs one year, and I think it was about 15 years ago. One year, that specific year, there was a real bump in the difficulty of the Year Six reading test. And what I saw was even a lot of academically bright and able kids, they got knocked back by that difficulty. And then in the test, they underperformed. And looking back, I think if we'd placed more emphasis on their character, their resilience, then their outcomes, as measured by the SATs anyhow, would have been much higher. And what we'd done is we'd over-optimised for information transfer in lessons, and we'd neglected to develop their character skills. So that was on me and my team, but that's learning from the benefit of my experience.
By the way, I should say while we're talking about strong emotions and difficulties, if this episode sort of links with what you're seeing with the pupils in your school, we do have a free download that can help called How to Manage: How to Help Children Manage Anger and Other Strong Emotions. It walks through the difference between self-control and self-regulation, why teaching kids to try and hold it together tends to fail when you put them under pressure, how to help children spark when their emotions are rising early on, and then how to help them act before they get overwhelmed by those emotions. It's practical. It's classroom-friendly. And you can download it for free from the Beacon School Support website. I'll put a direct link in the episode description so you can tap straight through to it or visit beaconschoolsupport.co.uk/resources. That's beaconschoolsupport.co.uk/resources. And you'll see it near the top of the page.
I think the key thing to remember about this episode is children don't lack resilience. Many just haven't had enough repeated experiences of difficulty that's presented in a safe, structured, and explained way. So it isn't overwhelming for them. And although, all right, I was dumping on overly scaffolded learning earlier on. But I guess what I'm saying is we do also need to scaffold difficulty and failure so our kids learn the skills to cope.
They need support to understand how to recover emotionally when they encounter difficulties. And they need us as the adults to teach them how to stay engaged through challenge, even when it doesn't feel good. That means our job isn't to remove the hard bits. It's to help our children realise that they can handle them, that they've got it in them.
And on that note, I realise I've just said resilience about 47 times, and I'm not editing that out so you're stuck with it. And also, while I'm recording this podcast, the cat also wants to leave, and it started clawing at the door. Hopefully, that's not being picked up on the mic... on the microwave, on the microphone.
If you found this episode useful and you have a colleague who's seeing difficulties with their students' resilience, remember to forward this episode to them or share it. Or even feel free to use snippets from this episode to introduce a discussion about resilience in a staff meeting to move things forward for your pupils in your school. I hope my mistakes didn't ruin your listening experience today. Thank you for listening, and I'll see you next time on School Behaviour Secrets.
(This automated transcript may not be 100% accurate.)
