When your child gets teased or bullied at school, excluded by others or feels like they are no good at anything, the natural reaction many parents have is to overprotect their children. However this tends to do more harm than good! Raising a child who knows how to deal with adversities and knows how to adapt and look for positive outcomes in the most traumatic situations is the key to helping your child to thrive.
The 7 C’s model provides parents with a practical approach to build blocks of resilience in children. They are composed of:
Competence
Confidence
Connection
Character
Contribution
Coping
Control
Parents can help their children achieve these resilience blocks through simple things like letting them make safe mistakes, encouraging qualities like fairness, letting the child express themselves, talking about how their behaviour affects people positively or negatively, teaching them values, guiding them to develop positive and effective coping strategies and teaching them that discipline is about teaching, not punishing or controlling.
Another great way of building resilience is through drama classes. Not only do they help build self esteem, but they also engage kids in collaborative work and negotiation. In drama classes children will learn that no matter how small or big their role might be, they’re as important to the success of a performance as everyone else in the class. They will also learn to express themselves in better ways, which is key to understanding resilience.
Through drama classes children can also learn a lot about empathy and acceptance. By taking on and playing a different personality or character, children get to explore how that character thinks, feels, then acts and behaves. In turn, the child becomes aware of how he thinks and feels which guides their own behaviour. This increases self awareness and self acceptance, building an inner strength.
A Behavioural Study showed that play and drama have an extremely positive effect in building resilience in children at risk. From using basic structured play and drama, the researchers were able to observe an increase in self-confidence and reduction in disruptive behaviour among the children.
At Hive, we offer drama classes for children from 3 to 14 years old. Our Drama Bees program caters to the needs of children from 3 to 8 years old and our Stage Bees Program was specially designed for kids from ages 8 to 14. We also offer drama classes through Bee School, a complete program that includes art and music classes for kids 3-6 years old.