Fresh Take: Talia Kovacs on How to Teach Kids Resilience

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0:32Hello, everyone, and welcome to Fresh Take from What Fresh Hell? Laughing in the face of motherhood. This is Margaret.

0:38Heidi Raykeil:And this is Amy. Today we're talking to Talia Kovacs. She is a resilience coach helping parents raise resilient kids. Combining her past experience as a classroom teacher, curriculum consultant, the former CEO of Lit Life, and using her degree in theology, Talia gives parents the tools to foster resilience in themselves and in their children. Welcome, Talia. Hi, thanks. I'm so happy to be here. So tell us, first of all, we want to make sure we all know what we're talking about. How do you define resilience? Resilience is simply the ability to do the next best thing and the next best thing and the next best thing until you're okay again.

1:15It's the ability to take positive action in your life. Wow. What made you, of all the different things you've been exposed to, focus on resilience as the focal point of your work? So I had a job where I traveled around the country and around the world teaching teachers to teach reading. That was my big, big job. I was in almost every single school district in the United States, large, urban, small, rural, everything in between. And what I saw over and over again is that kids right now, and this is a pre-COVID issue that just got worse with COVID, have a lot of, I'll call it lowercase a, anxiety.

1:56And they are scared to make mistakes, hate when they do, are really, really focused on getting things right, and frankly, are worried about if they can handle hard things. Don't think that they can. And a lot of parents at home are experiencing this, but I saw this in schools and I was helping teachers work on this. At the same time, what I found was that my own resilience was being tested. I was running around the country teaching teachers. And over the span of a few years, sadly, my mom died. My mother-in-law died. My grandmother died. And I had many miscarriages. And I was knocked down. I could not get on the airplane to go to work.

2:42I was turning off my camera during Zoom meetings, pretending like it wasn't working. I was like, oh, you can't see me weird, like in bed, just like turning meetings into virtual and really knocked down. And I had to figure out how to get back up. My grandparents are all Holocaust survivors. I knew that what I was going through was not the hardest thing anyone has ever gone through. And so I read everything on resilience. I read memoirs from child soldiers, books of war veterans. I read almost all of the studies. I only say almost because maybe there are ones that I didn't find. And what I learned is that actually you can build resilience and there is not an innate sense of resilience that some people have and some people don't.

3:32It is a learned trait. So I set off to do that work with parents and families because really teachers are with kids for a few hours a day for a year and your parents are your parents forever. And this is what kids need right now. So it's a learned skill, resilience, but are there kids who are naturally more resilient and kids who are naturally more sensitive or anxious? I don't know what the other side of the resilience spectrum, how to define it, but there must be people and children who have natural set points for resilience that are different. Yeah, absolutely. There are people who are more resilient.

4:11And you having three kids, you see some of our kids are what researchers call dandelions. They will be fine no matter what. They can get back up. They will grow in the concrete. Some of our kids are what researchers call orchids, where they need a set of systems to be surrounded by in order to grow and flourish. I like that they chose dandelion instead of cockroach. Something that survives

4:35Heidi Raykeil:anything. I think sometimes we think of resilience as the trophy you didn't want. Well, you do get this resilience trophy because you've gone through some really hard stuff, kid. But look how resilient you are. And it's a great personality trait that is very hard won. But you've learned in your research that we don't have to go through hard things or our children don't have to be marched through hard things in order to become resilient? How do we start to separate those two things? This is actually the biggest thing that comes up in the parents that I work with. A lot of parents will tell me, I mean, honestly, myself included, like, I had a harder childhood than this kid has.

5:12The biggest thing this kid, my kid that I'm raising has to worry about is like, what color cleats to wear, you know, to soccer, right? They're feeling like, oh, my God, is my kid too spoiled? Am I not creating enough hardship for them? I don't want them to have hardship. I were tarred so that their childhood would be easier, but now they are falling apart over the slightest provocation. And so that is the good news about resilience is that actually there are systems that we could put in place in a home to enable kids to find their own inner resilience muscle. It starts with focusing on ourselves and on our kids' strengths, and it moves from there.

5:52Spirituality is a big part of it. But overall, kids, even if nothing big and horrible is happening to them, and thank God for that, they can learn resilience. I work with some people who've had all the grit any human being should ever have to have and resilience that is born of horrible, difficult ACEs childhoods. That's right. There is clearly a point where resilience is just kind of a thin ice over a tremendous amount of personal damage. So I like to sort of test the joists of this a little bit that if you've been forced right by a childhood that has been barely survivable and resilience is the only trait you've developed, that's not great.

6:43Kids who have gone through and developed this kind of hard-won resilience, it's often at the expense of knowing what their other positive character traits are, being able to kind of relax into their strengths, being able to be held by family. and where I come from, where I sit, a lot of the families that I work with, it's almost coming from the opposite direction of my kid needs me too much. Like they're seven and I'm still getting them dressed in the morning and I'm still making their lunch and packing their backpack and do it, you know, making sure they have their homework and getting them out the door and no shade to parents who are doing that.

7:19Most of the parents that I work with are, but it is because I think as modern parents right now, we feel really watched, for lack of a better term. Like we're watching all of the reels and all the TikTok videos, listening to all the podcasts. That part's good. That part's fine. Very good. Keep listening. Right. Keep listening to podcasts. Yeah. And it seems like there's one right way to parent. And so we're a little bit more nervous. We as parents are a little bit more anxious. We feel like, are we getting this right? Is this panel of judges that we are imagining is watching us, You know, when we're making a learning moment out of spilled milk instead of just getting our kids to clean it up and move on, talking so much to our kids about their feelings.

8:00Meanwhile, young kids are young mammals who are not so verbally oriented. And so there's almost been an overcorrection from the kind of resilience building of maybe our child, the 70s, 80s, 90s, and we're seeking to right the ship a little bit.

8:16Heidi Raykeil:Let's talk about spirituality because you study theology. And you say that spirituality is what's missing from conversations about resilience. So tell us what role spirituality can play in all of this. Yeah. And I mean spirituality as separate from religion. A lot of parents right now are kind of areligious. They grew up with maybe a tricky relationship to religion. They are not sure how to give their kid a larger understanding of themselves in not just the world, but maybe the universe. This kind of shows up in narrow ways at home and then in bigger ways out in the world. At home, what we might call spirituality, which is your relationship to the world around you, the natural world, an awareness of being among life instead of just being alive.

9:08At home, that shows up as, you know, why do I need to clear the table? Do I need to help all of these people around me, right? That's kind of the narrow spirituality of the home is how am I connected to these four or five or six other people around me that live in the same place as me? And then the kind of universal spirituality is how am I connected to the earth and the world around me? I believe, and the research shows, that kids have a natural sense of being connected to the world around them. A lot of young kids will talk to animals and talk to trees and have a really big sense that they are among life.

9:46That gets kind of slowly whittled away without nurturing it until our kids are teenagers and young adults and they feel like they're the only person in the world that is experiencing what they're experiencing. They don't have these kind of larger stories or myths to lean back on to show that other people have gone through hard things before them. They don't have this kind of bigger world awareness that there is maybe something larger that is holding them. There are many meta-analyses of individual studies that show that when kids and teenagers, a lot of the studies are done on teenagers, have an awareness that there is a larger world around them and something bigger holding them.

10:26That's kind of the through line. Something bigger that they could lean on, that there are lower rates of anxiety, lower rates of depression, and a higher rate of resilience.

10:35Heidi Raykeil:The version of this when I was growing up was there are children in India without enough to eat. Now finish your dinner. You know, like that sort of thing. Like, don't you know how good you have it, that there was this sense of guilty luck of where you are in the world. But you're talking about something that's much more profound, which is that you're being held within this larger world of which you're a small part. Yes. Because I wasn't sure what the connection was to resilience. And I understand it's like you can relax into this. The universe is holding you up just like it's holding up the dandelion and things are going to be OK in a way that I think all of us can lose sight in the rat race of where's my blue cleats?

11:08Heidi Raykeil:I want my blue cleats and we're 20 minutes slate. That's right. For parents too, what I see is that when parents start on trying to develop a spiritual practice for their kids, often they develop their own spiritual practice. And there is something about giving your kid over to the universe a little bit, like understanding that every single thing that you do is important and it's a part of your kid's life. And also, this is their soul's journey. Think about your relationship with your parents right now as adults, like they're a part of your life. They are not the biggest person in your life. And it allows us to relax into being gardeners, not engineers.

11:47Like it's not about A plus B equals C. It's about let me step back. Let me see how this kid in front of me is growing. What might they need? Gardeners know to slow down. Gardeners can't move a plant 10 times, right? Like they slow down. They see what's around them. Gardeners also know that they're not in full control. Sometimes it's the sunshine. Sometimes it's the soil. Sometimes it's the wind. They are one part of what makes something grow. And a spiritual practice allows us as parents to lean into the fact that we are one small part of what makes our kid who they are.

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15:38Heidi Raykeil:And with frames at under$30, I got a second pair just because. If your glasses are overdue for a refresh, now is the time. Go to zenni.com slash podcast and use code podcast15 for 15 % off your first order. These styles sell out, so don't sit on it. That's zenni.com slash podcast, promo code podcast15. So Talia, you work with parents, families, and you bring a framework to them for raising resilient kids. So tell us about how that work starts. Yes, I am a teacher. The Raising Resilient Kids is a full framework. It's a curriculum that parents go through. And this is really what it takes for developing resilience as a system and a structure at home and not just like a script or something that you try once in a while.

16:29So the first step in the framework is we start with ourselves. We are the most important people in our own lives. Who we are and how we are matters really deeply for us and for our kids. We tell our own stories of resilience. We focus on what are we contributing to the overall weather, temperature, climate at home, and how are our actions going to set us up for our own resilience to be calmer, to calm our own nervous systems, to show our kids how much we delight in them. And we just focus on what are we contributing to the household. The second step in the resilience framework is we create the right conditions.

17:20So after kind of shoring up our own resilience and figuring out who and how we are and what we are contributing at home, we set our kids up with systems and structures that they need to develop resilience. And so this includes things like establishing a practice of independent play, which for most kids in 2026 is the only time that they can sail privately. Right. Like they can figure out what to do next without an adult watching them. We establish practices for developing our kids sense of inner strength without them needing to do anything. we focus on what is going well. What are their strengths of character?

18:03Not like they're good at soccer, they're good at art, but actually they're someone with a lot of perseverance. They're someone with a lot of social awareness. They're someone with a lot of leadership. A lot of the kids I work with, they're someone with a lot of zest, right? Zesty kids. Zesty kids. And these are real strengths of character. And we can help our kids get a sense of who they are within the larger family dynamics. So how can they use their strengths to help their siblings? How can they use their strengths to help at home? If they're a kid who cares about fairness, maybe they're the ones who distributes dessert.

18:35You know, they're a kid who cares about humor and is really funny. Maybe they start off dinner with a joke. So thinking about how can we help our kids show off who they are, create the conditions for our kids to be successful at home, successful contributors, successful solvers of problems, and successful family members. And then the last step is we build our kids' capacity. A lot of the reels that we watch, a lot of the things that we hear from child therapists, God bless child therapists, are here's how you build your kids' capacity for resilience, right? Like you give them opportunities to fail.

19:14You allow them to solve problems on their own. You step back a little bit. Well, it's really hard to step back a little bit if you haven't done the previous steps of seeing who they are, seeing what their strengths are, seeing what makes you, the parent, resilient, seeing how that's different than what will make your kid resilient because maybe you have two totally different sets of strengths, and really doing all of that pre-work so that when we get up to building our kids' capacity for resilience, we're able to help them go toward fear and really use their strengths to solve problems, which is something that I focus on deeply with families.

19:49It strikes me that the opposing force of all of this is anxiety from the parents and the idea that our job is to keep our kids safe. And we've talked a lot on the podcast. My sister-in-law talks about being out in the woods as a child, climbing 30-foot trees. We have a little woods behind our house that has a big ditch under a log that the kids like to climb across, even from the time they were like three, four or five years old. And I was very wary of letting their friends do it because if you fell, you would be hospitalized. And I think that we have, in a correct way, put a huge weight onto the safety of our children, but that it is harder to build resilience if you never face unsafe circumstances.

20:37In our generation, Amy and I generation, right? There was a kid in a cast in every single classroom. Someone had a broken arm or broken leg every Monday from something stupid they did over the weekend. And so how does that balance come to play? I'm so glad that you brought up the casts. I definitely notice a complete lack of casts. And I will say I have three children, knock on wood, who I try to let be pretty free, but I've never broken a bone. Oh, geez. You can have some of mine.

21:06Heidi Raykeil:We've had a few. Have you? Stitches, like, yeah, I feel like we're full up on those. But I take the larger point, you know, I take the larger point on the slightly dangerous activities unobserved by adults. Yes. Yes. And we all know that our biggest resilient moments come from we look around, oh, look, there's no one else to depend on but me. Let me take a step forward. That's one part of resilience. The other part of resilience is I'm going to have a safe place to land if this goes wrong. That's almost like an under-talked about part of resilience in the book, The Resilience Myth by Soraya Shamali.

21:39She talks a lot about that, where resilience is actually built from knowing that you have a safe community to come back to if something doesn't go well. I think that we've frankly overcorrected. We keep our kids overly safe in the real world to their detriment. We keep our kids under safe in the virtual world to their detriment. And so what you brought up actually, Margaret, about the other parents, I think is a really big part of this where we're almost performing safe parenting on the playground, after school, at school pickup. We have this awareness in a way that our parents really didn't of being constantly watched and kind of graded on how we're doing.

22:22And so we're overly like, oh, I see you're angry. It's okay to be angry, but it's not okay to hit. So I'm going to move you over here. And we're kind of performing all of these things that we see and we think are right. And what I see in my work with parents over and over again is that when we really start with ourselves and focus on what made me resilient, what can I contribute to my kids' inner life? How can I focus on their strengths? If you ask any parent right now listening, they will have a list of 15 things that their kids need to do better, like I do as well. Things that they need to work on physically, emotionally.

23:02And so I work with parents on really creating a list just as long of what their kid is already doing well, because you're not going to trust your kid to go out back and play in the ditch if you don't trust them to make smart decisions and don't trust them to take the next best step when something goes wrong. And so it really does require us seeing our kids for the good that is in them first and And the good that's in them most of the time when this is hard, it's because we have a parent who's really prudent, who is really a leader or who really has a lot of perseverance and a kid who has, you know, maybe a lot of social awareness, maybe just other strengths that are not the same strengths as their parent.

23:43And so their parent is kind of looking at them like, well, I don't even think that you can do this. You know, like, well, how will you even handle this? And so we have to get past that feeling. Like you can tell parents all day, like let your kid go around the corner to buy a loaf of bread. And I think that that conversation is happening now. But parents who don't really innately trust their kids to make the next best decision are not going to do that until they see their kids differently.