In looking for ways to raise the emotional resilience of children, it’s important to start out by saying there isn’t one. Children, it turns out, come in all sorts of varieties that make it impossible to chart a single road to resilience.

Approximately 15% of public school K-12 students require an individualized education plan addressing their unique abilities. The disparities in outcomes begin at birth, with infants having to navigate significant challenges before they achieve school age.

The first opportunity to raise more resilient children is prenatal. The most successful intervention at this stage is Parent-Child Interactive Therapy (PCIT), which involves prenatal counseling designed to reduce parental stress levels, and continues into infancy with a trained counselor offering in-home sessions and guidance.

PCIT is expensive, but the results for children are amazing, and that’s mostly due to the reduction in the stress levels of parents. The training helps parents anticipate an infant’s needs and respond to signals and cues. It teaches them to deal with the demands of raising an infant without taking it out on the infant.

An analysis of a pre-pandemic National Survey of Children’s Health focusing on resilience in children aged 6 months to 5 years found that “when parents are emotionally supported, children are more likely to flourish.” The study is based on reported adverse childhood experiences, or ACEs. Standardized ACE questionnaires assess 10 experiences, including abuse, neglect, substance abuse, parental separation, mental illness, and incarceration. According to their research, these experiences often result in:

• The production of toxic stress
• Neurobiological damage
• Alterations in brain structure and function
• Negative health trajectories
• Impacts across generations

“Among the 14,494 young children (aged 6 months to 5 years old) included in our sample, 12% reported 2 or more ACEs,” write the authors. The demographics of the sample are close to those of the U.S. population: 53% of the children were White, non-Hispanic, 88% lived in urban areas, and 53% lived in what researchers call “supportive neighborhoods.”

However, even children exposed to more than two ACEs reportedly “flourished” under certain conditions. What are those conditions?

• Residence in a supportive neighborhood
• Parents who experienced emotional support in raising children
• Resilient families

We are starting to see a pattern here: Children with parents who “experience emotional support” raise children who are able to recover more quickly from adverse events. That emotional support can come through interventions such as PCIT, through extended family, and even from the community. As infants age, their neighborhood becomes increasingly important to developing resilience.

A fascinating study out of Romania found that parents of young children had the same reported levels of stress, whether or not their child was developmentally disabled. It indicated the high levels of stress that come with any parenting. According to researchers, the two groups of parents used different “resilience strategies”:

[P]arents of children with late development are more likely to resort to strategies to manage stress and difficulties such as assertive action, social communion, precautionary action, and social support search.

The parents of children with late development were more proactive about taking measures to minimize stressful situations, manage their stress, and reach out for community support. They may experience more stress, but they also have better skills for coping with it.

Moving along into adolescence, we can see that children have already established strategies for dealing with stress, and some of these, such as binge eating, are unhealthy. A systematic review of the scientific literature on emotional intelligence (EQ) and resilience in adolescents found:

• EQ and resilience are positively associated with academic performance.
• EQ and resilience are negatively related to school burnout.
• Resilience positively predicts self-motivation.
• High levels of self-motivation result in greater commitment to lessons.
• Higher EQ “promotes a deeper sense of life satisfaction.”

Here’s a little advice for parents stressing over building resilient children. First, don’t stress, de-stress. By learning how to manage your own stress and displaying that behavior toward children, they will begin to have the tools to cope with what’s coming. When children reach adolescence, their friends are more important to their resilience than their parents:

“Family support is not a significant predictor of the effect of EQ on resilience, but friends support is,” write the authors of the systematic review, adding, “people who have higher levels of EQ perceive themselves more capable to deal with negative experiences and to cope with adversity.”

So how do you build the emotional intelligence that leads to self-confidence, optimism, and resilience in the face of adversity? I’ll leave you with this suggestion: playing. As a study from Nigeria found:

Play supports school children’s cognitive, social, and emotional development… including problem-solving, creativity, and language and reading development. [Play enhances] self-control, expressiveness, and intelligence.

It turns out building resilient children can be fun! If you start early, and play often, you’ll be doing all you can. Once they hit middle school, their friends will play a bigger role than their caregivers in emotional development and resilience. You might want to show their friends some stress management techniques, such as playing.

Written by Steve O’Keefe. First published June 1, 2026.

Sources:

“Examining child flourishing, family resilience, and adversity in the 2016 National Survey of Children’s Health,” Journal of Pediatric Nursing, September-October 2022.

“Anxiety, Stress, and Resilience Strategies in Parents of Children with Typical and Late Psychosocial Development: Comparative Analysis,” International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, February 14, 2022.

“Understanding the Role of Play in Promoting Cognitive, Social, and Emotional Development in School Children: Implications for Counsellors and Evaluators,” University of Delta Journal of Contemporary Studies in Education, 2023.

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