What can flowers teach us about Resilience?

young boy in a field of flowers - learning about resilience (tots to teens) - tots to teens

Psychologist Sara Chatwin says new academic research shows despite their seemingly fragile appearance, flowers literally bounce back up if knocked over. This can teach us a thing or two about resilience, a key coping factor children and adults need.

Resilience in simple terms is that little nudge out of a rut when we need it! It is essential for getting us through change and for allowing us to re-group, re-define and rebalance our lives.

This year, New Zealand Flowers Week is all about ‘Resilience in Bloom’. Sara shares her top parenting tips to build resilience in your child:

  • Parents need to PARENT their children and stop abdicating responsibility to technology to do the parenting.
  • Get back to basics with manners and with empowering children to take on board the core values: kindness, loyalty, honesty
  • Do not encourage them to ‘follow the pack’ and do things just because others do it and it might seem ‘cool’.
  • Keep your kids close and communicate with them to ensure that problems and issues can be worked through and not let to fester until they are adults who then don’t have the resilience to cope and manage situations that are unique or unusual.

As part of New Zealand Flowers Week’s ‘Resilience in Bloom’ campaign (November 16-22), up to 50,000 stems of NZ grown flowers will be donated by Feel Good With Flowers, with 64 florists around the country taking part to create bouquets. The locally grown flowers will be handed out from hundreds of locations around the country including train stations, charity centres, stadiums and city streets from Dunedin to Auckland.

Click here for more tips on parenting and kids’ behaviour

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