Ep 111: Ask Charlotte - How to Build Your Child’s Resilience as School Goes Back
By Charlotte Cummings | Feel Better Podcast
How to Set Your Child Up for a Resilient Start to the School Year
Ask Charlotte – Episode 111
As parents, we all want the same thing: for our children to feel safe, confident, and emotionally okay as they head into a new school year.
Recently, a parent asked me a powerful question:
“How do I set my child up for a resilient start to the year after they’ve had a tough time?”
It’s such an important conversation — because resilience isn’t about telling our kids to toughen up. It’s about giving them the skills to cope, the language to express themselves, and the confidence to ask for help when they need it.
Here’s what really helps children build true, lasting resilience.
What Resilience Actually Means for Children
Resilience isn’t about “bouncing back” or pretending everything is fine.
Real resilience looks like:
Strong emotional literacy
Knowing when something isn’t okay
Feeling safe to talk about what’s going on
Being confident enough to ask for help
When children have those skills, they can find their way back to feeling okay — even when things are hard.
And that’s far better for their long-term mental health than any “just try harder” message.
Help Your Child Understand What Isn’t Okay
Children are navigating a complex social world for the very first time. We can’t assume they know what’s normal, acceptable, or healthy — even if they’re at school every day.
One of the most important things you can do is clearly define:
What is okay socially
What is not okay
When something needs adult help
Talk openly about bullying
Bullying can include:
Being repeatedly left out
Being picked on
Unkind or targeted comments
Behaviour that makes your child feel small or unsafe
And here’s a crucial piece many children miss:
Bullying and unkind behaviour can come from people they like — even friends.
Kids often think they have to tolerate poor treatment just because someone is a “friend”. Clear messaging from you helps them understand they don’t.
Build Emotional Literacy (and Make Space for Talking)
Children can’t share what they don’t have words for.
Building emotional literacy — the ability to identify and talk about feelings — is a cornerstone of resilience.
I know family life is busy. Mornings are rushed. Evenings are full. But children still need regular moments of your undivided attention.
That might look like:
A chat before bedtime
Lying with them at night
Reading together and talking first
A one-on-one outing every couple of weeks
What matters is the message:
“I care about how you are, and I’m available.”
Open the door — and let them choose when to walk through it
Sometimes I tell my children:
“This is me opening the door to a conversation. You can walk through it now, later, or close it — but the door stays there.”
This creates safety without pressure. It also reinforces that it’s your job as a parent to ask — and their choice when to share.
Set the Expectation That Talking Matters
Many parents feel resigned to the idea that their child “just won’t talk”.
But we can set the expectation that:
We need to know how they’re doing
Their inner world matters
Talking is part of family life
Sometimes this means being creative:
Sharing your own highlights and lowlights
Asking better questions
Making conversations playful rather than interrogative
(If you need help with this, I’ve created Table Talk — a simple dinner-table game with hundreds of questions designed to build emotional literacy. It’s available on my website.)
Support and Scaffold Your Child’s Friendships
Children’s relationships are a huge part of how they feel about themselves.
If you can, try to:
Prioritise small playdates
Meet at the park
Have friends over
Observe patterns without hovering
You don’t need to micromanage — but you can gently coach.
After a playdate, you might ask:
“Did you feel good playing with them?”
“I noticed a tricky moment — how was that for you?”
These conversations help children recognise which relationships feel safe and supportive — and which don’t.
Teach Your Child How to Ask for Help
Asking for help is not a weakness.
It’s a life skill.
I tell my kids:
“People who are doing well in life ask for help — and they ask early.”
Sometimes children need support learning how to do this:
You might go with them to the teacher at first
Then gradually let them take the lead
Eventually, they learn they’re not stuck or trapped
That sense of “I can get help” is incredibly powerful for a child’s wellbeing.
What’s a child problem vs an adult problem?
This distinction matters.
Bullying is an adult problem
A child’s role is to tell someone
Adults are responsible for keeping them safe
This takes pressure off children who blame themselves and carry things too deeply.
Normalise Help and Normalise Life
Children need to see that:
Adults ask for help too
No one handles everything alone
Life includes tricky people
In our family, we jokingly talk about “jimmy bobs” — people who irritate us or don’t make us feel good.
We teach our kids:
Everyone has jimmy bobs
It’s okay not to gel with everyone
You’re allowed to keep some distance from people who drain you
This normalises social discomfort without making it scary or personal.
A Resilient Start Doesn’t Have to Be Perfect
You don’t need to do everything.
You don’t need to do it all at once.
And you don’t need to get it right every time.
If you focus on:
Emotional literacy
Clear boundaries around what’s okay
Asking for help
Supportive relationships
You’re already doing something incredibly protective for your child’s mental health.
Even one small shift can make a big difference.
If you’d like more support, tools, or resources for emotionally supporting your child, explore what’s available on the Charlotte Cummings website — including Table Talk and the Ask Charlotte podcast back catalogue.
You’re not alone in this — and neither is your child. 💛
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Well welcome along to Ask Charlotte, launching now for this new year 2026. This year with Ask Charlotte the episodes are going to look a little different to how they've looked in the past. In the past I have had a theme for each episode but three different listener questions covered over the episode but I recognize that that makes it a little bit hard to find the answers that you're looking for at times.
So what I'm doing this year is each Ask Charlotte episode is just going to be about one listener question. That way they'll be able to be searched for a little bit easier and you'll be able to find your way through the catalogue of different issues that I've covered. So here we go with today's episode and something that I was asked over summer.
A parent was sharing with me about some struggles that their child had last year and they were asking me how do I set them up for a resilient start to the year and I thought this was a great question. As you know I'm really passionate about the mental health of our children and what we can do as parents to assist them because ultimately that helps our mental health and well-being too. So one of the hardest things as parents is that we can't control so much of what happens in our children's lives.
If they're at school they're away from us for a significant portion of each week and we need to be able to give them skills to cope well when they are away from us. And what I want to be clear about here is that resilience isn't about toughening up our children or them being resilient in a like bounce back and you'll be right, get going again kind of a way. But resilience is about helping our children have strong emotional literacy, being able to share about what is occurring when there are problems and being really good at seeking help when there is something going on that is difficult.
That is my definition of what actually helps a child to be resilient. Those skills that they need to be able to find that place where they feel good again. That's when they get to experience resilience and feel okay if they have those skills in place.
It's also teaching our kids that their feelings matter, that actually what is happening for them day in day out matters to us, matters to the other significant adults around them and that there are other people who are out there to help. Those skills help them so much better in the long term and whatever environments they are faced with and they are so much better for their long-term mental health than this constant try harder and just toughen up message. So one of the key things with our kids is actually helping define what isn't okay because remember this is their first rodeo.
They are living through this really complex social world for the very first time and sometimes we can assume they know certain things or they're learning particular things at school that actually we need to reinforce at home or perhaps even cover for the first time. So one of the key things there is talking about what is and isn't okay socially. What kind of scenarios constitute bullying? So if they're being left out, if they're being picked on, if people are saying unkind things about them and that's repeated and targeted at them, that's bullying and that isn't okay and sometimes one of the things we even need to point out to our children is that bullying and unkind treatment can even happen from people that we like who are our friends.
I think this is somewhere where a lot of children come unstuck, where they think that actually well this person is my friend and I like them back so I'm just going to have to tolerate whatever it is that they're doing. That can get really sticky for children and their social relationships. So being clear with them as a parent about what is and isn't okay, what kind of behaviors they shouldn't tolerate and that they need to get help with is something that is very important for you to be reinforcing and giving clear messaging around within your parent-child relationship.
Now building the emotional literacy and capacity of your children to share what is happening for them emotionally is so important. Coupled with this is being able to have times where your child is able to talk to you. Now I know the realities of busy family life, of the dinner rush, the hustle out the door in the morning, the after-school activities, the busy weekends juggling social things and sports.
I get it that it looks pretty full-on for most families but being able to have some little rituals and moments where your children do get a slice of your undivided attention is really important. So maybe that's lying with them in bed at night, maybe that's having a chat before you read a bedtime story with them, maybe that is having an opportunity where they just go out with you every couple of weeks. Whatever that looks like to fit your child, having time when they're asked how they are or if there's anything that they've got to share with you is super important.
I raised something recently with one of my kids and I said hey this is a bit of an awkward conversation but this is basically mummy like opening the door and if you decide one day you want to walk through the door and have this chat with me you can but my job as a mum is to open the door and your job is to walk through it when you want to walk through it and to close it if you don't want to have that conversation with me. The child very quickly said I'm closing the door but I know that I can revisit that conversation and they get it that it's my job to ask about this particular thing. So being able to have rituals, language, expectations that they will talk to you I think is really important.
It is my job as a parent to know how you are and to know that you're okay so of course I'm going to ask you these questions. I think a lot of parents unfortunately accept that their child just won't talk to them, that they can't get anything out of them about their day and I actually think we can be a bit more creative than that and set the expectation from our kids that we do need to know how they are and what is happening for them. Sometimes we need to do a little bit of role modeling around this as well and share a bit about our day or the things that have been highlights or lowlights within our day.
I've got a great episode all about how to get your child to talk about feelings if you want to check that out and I've also developed something really fresh for the new year called Table Talk which is a little game that you can play at the dinner table with hundreds literally of questions that you can use to ask them about their day and to get them building some good emotional literacy. That's available now on my website if you want to check it out. The other thing I think we can do as parents to support our children emotionally and with their level of resilience is to nurture their social relationships.
Now I have quite a few playdates with my kids that I really value and prioritize because for me having the opportunity to coach my kids socially, not to helicopter over them and to be too involved but to help kind of see what's going on in their patterns and social situations is something that is really helpful and nurturing those good relationships, helping them see what relationships make them feel good, who they play well with, is something you can actually get a bit more involved with as a parent if you have the capacity to do so. So trying to make that effort even for little playdates, maybe meeting up at the park or going to do something together after school, having someone around on the weekend, can be really valuable to build your child's resilience because how they feel in their relationships is a really key determinant of how well they feel and how happy they are. Even things like being able to ask your child after a playdate, do you feel good when you play with that person? I noticed there was a little moment when this happened, how was that for you? So you don't have to get ultra involved and be playing with them flat out in the playdate but you're able to observe and see things that you can pick up and help your child with.
The reality is that schools are so busy that they often don't have the opportunity to do some of the skill building with our kids, so that is back on us as parents. I am also a big believer in teaching asking for help. Now I talk to my kids about this in a really particular way.
I say that asking for help is actually a really important life skill and if there is something going on that we need to ask for help around, that is a great opportunity to practice this skill of asking for help. I talk to my kids about how people who are really happy often have to ask for help and being quick at asking for help is a really good thing in our lives. Sometimes we need to give our kids assistance around this, so it might be that if something is going on that's difficult for them at school, you're going together with them to the teacher and firstly you're having the conversation with the teacher about what's happening but with your child present.
And then it might be if something needs to be talked about again, you're going together to the teacher but your child is taking the lead and doing the talking or you're opening it and then they're doing their thing. But getting to the point where you're scaffolding your child and learning how to ask for help is a really important factor in increasing their resilience and sense of well-being. Knowing that they're not stuck, they're not trapped, they're not beyond being helped is really important psychologically for our children and I encourage you to talk to your kids about what is a them problem and an adult problem.
If there is something like bullying going on, that's actually an adult problem and their part of solving the problem is telling someone what's happening and if there's any advice that they need to listen to about doing something differently or avoiding something, the adult will talk to them about that but solving it is an adult problem. That is really important for kids who take things on so deeply personally themselves. Having that sense of actually being able to say this isn't entirely a you problem, this is something that adults are responsible for, we're responsible for making sure that you're safe and happy and your responsibility is to tell us when something's going on that you need help with.
I encourage normalizing help too. I go to the hairdresser because I need help cutting my hair. I go to the doctor because I need help with medical things.
We can go to all sorts of people in life for help including when we're not feeling good or when something not great is happening around us. Another really important thing you can do to improve your child's sense of resilience is normalize some of the stuff that they're facing. Now in our house we have this great little phrase, I'm a wee bit reluctant to share this in case at any time my kid drops it into a conversation, but we talk about jimmy bobs.
Now jimmy bobs are people that you find particularly annoying and I even talk with my kids about the fact that actually adults have jimmy bobs all around them too. In life there are jimmy bobs everywhere, those people that we find irritating, annoying, that we don't really want to be around, that don't make us feel good and we talk about beware the jimmy bobs, orbit the jimmy bobs, keep as much distance between you and the jimmy bobs as possible. And the reality is that there will be people who like these people that we struggle with, who are their friends and that is great, but we're all allowed to have people that we have a bit of tension with, that we don't particularly gel with and that we want to keep some space from.
So beware the jimmy bobs, our little family phrase that you might want to pick up too. So if you're wanting to set your child up for a really resilient start to the year, think about how you scaffold their social relationships, how you teach them to ask for help and support them in that, how you improve their emotional literacy and set the tone that you as a parent do want to know how they are and what's happening, how you define what is and isn't okay and how you teach them the normal life experience of avoiding the people who don't make us feel the best. You don't have to do it all perfectly and you don't have to do it all at once but hopefully there are a couple of little tips in today's episode that help you set your child up for the year.
