“Resilience acts as a buffer to adversity”

For Children's Mental Health Week, we spoke to Dr Sarah Cresswell, a Senior Lecturer in Counselling and Psychotherapy at the University of Derby, who has over a decade of experience working in CAMHS, and 20 years of psychotherapeutic experience.

This year's theme focuses on teaching children to embrace self-awareness and develop resilience. In our interview, we explore the impact of 'collective resilience' and the steps adults can take to model resilient behaviours.

The theme of Children's Mental Health Week is, 'Know yourself, grow yourself' which focuses on teaching children to develop resilience. Why do you think it's important to learn resilience from a young age?

Resilience acts as a buffer to adversity—it's a key protective factor in children's mental health, helping them develop coping skills that support long-term emotional wellbeing and help them navigate challenges. But resilience isn't just about individual traits; it's shaped by the systems around a child or young person. 

Through my work, I've seen the power of collective resilience - where schools, families, and communities create environments that help children feel safe, supported, and emotionally regulated. This Whole School Approach shifts the focus from 'fixing' individual children to strengthening the network around them, making resilience something that's nurtured rather than expected.

I've worked with settings where this principle is applied systemically, such as in youth offending services and schools. When multiple agencies including education, social care, and mental health services work together with a shared approach, children feel more contained, and their behaviours reflect this. The more resilient the system around a child is, the calmer, more engaged and more able they are to develop their own resilience. That's why teaching resilience can't just be about individual skills - it's about embedding emotional literacy and psychological safety into the environments where children grow and learn.

Can you give an example of what collective resilience looks like?

Within the Whole School Approach, resilience isn't just built through one-to-one interventions, although these are important. A key part of this work includes delivering six to eight sessions of low-intensity CBT with children or parents to support emotional regulation, anxiety or other mental health challenges. But just as crucial is the wider, systemic approach working closely with the school's mental health lead and embedding the core principles of the Whole School Approach across the entire school community. From governors to lunchtime staff, everyone plays a role in fostering a school environment where mental health and wellbeing are recognised and supported and have information on how to identify young people who are struggling. 

A clear example of this in action was a project we led in a school experiencing high referral rates to mental health services. When we began working with them, we uncovered that many pupils, teachers and staff felt unsafe in their environment, which in turn impacted the emotional climate of the school. This lack of psychological safety was not only affecting staff wellbeing but also influencing students' sense of security and resilience.

Rather than jumping straight to solutions, we took a step back and facilitated conversations with both students and staff, asking each group to define what 'unsafe' meant to them. Unsurprisingly, their perspectives differed as students often described feeling unheard, overwhelmed by academic pressures, or unsupported when dealing with conflict, while staff highlighted concerns about behaviour management and the unpredictability of certain situations.

What changes did the school make to become more resilient?

By bringing these insights together, everyone worked to try and resolve the problem of, 'Why is our school not resilient and how can we improve?' We started to help the school identify why it wasn't resilient, not just at an individual level, but as a system. The real shift happened when students, teachers, support staff and governors all took collective ownership of the problem, working together to develop solutions. 

They made policy changes, implemented staff training and looked at staff sickness. We helped them understand why there was a culture of bullying within the school and to view the behaviour in a more positive way rather than jumping straight to punishment. There was a real mindset shift that developed throughout the school, which had to happen in policy, within senior management and within the young people. Changes included working towards better communication structures, clearer behavioural expectations, and a focus on co-regulation strategies rather than punitive responses. 

This is what collective resilience looks like. It isn't individual children learning coping strategies, but entire school communities working together to create environments that support and empower young people.

What advice would you give to parents or carers who want to help a child become more resilient?

One of the most important things I say to parents, and I say this as a parent myself, is know yourself first and know your impact on others. Kids don't just learn from what we say, they learn from what we do. If we want them to be resilient, we have to model emotional regulation ourselves. Of course, that's much easier said than done! No one gets it right all the time, and that's okay. But if we can work on managing our own stress, our own emotions, and recognising how we react to situations, it has a massive impact on how our children learn to handle challenges.

Children's behaviour is often a reflection of the environment around them, and sometimes parents find it hard to recognise that a child's coping style might have been learnt from family patterns. That doesn't mean we've done something wrong - it just means we have an opportunity to shift things. When we respond to children's emotions with curiosity rather than frustration, we see their behaviour for what it really is: a form of communication, not defiance, and even if it is defiance then we can figure why!

If I could give just a few key pieces of advice to parents, it would be:

• Regulate yourself first – If you can find ways to manage your own wellbeing, your child will benefit. When you're calmer, you understand their behaviour differently and can respond from a place of curiosity rather than reactivity.
• Validate emotions, but reframe setbacks – That doesn't mean pretending everything is fine, but showing them that difficult feelings aren't something to be avoided or feared. Instead of saying, 'Don't worry, it's nothing', try 'I can see this is really upsetting you. Let's think about what we can do next.'
• Teach problem-solving, not perfection – Resilience isn't about always succeeding, it's about handling setbacks. Encourage small risks and independence, whether that's letting them work through an issue with a friend rather than stepping in, or allowing them to make a mistake and figure out how to fix it.
• Connection before correction – When children feel heard and understood, they're far more open to learning from us. Before correcting behaviour, focus on connection by acknowledging their emotions, let them express themselves, and then help them work through the challenge.
• Foster a 'good enough' mindset – We don't need to teach our kids to be perfect, we need to teach them to be okay with imperfection. If they see us making mistakes and handling them with self-compassion, they'll learn to do the same.

So, it's important for adults to understand their emotions so they can respond to children in a healthy way?

Absolutely! One of the things I see time and time again, both in my work with parents and in counselling more broadly, is how many adults struggle to understand their own emotions. I've worked with people in their 50s and 60s who say they still don't fully grasp what they're feeling, or that they find themselves reacting in ways that don't match what's really going on inside. If we don't understand ourselves, it inevitably affects how we relate to others, including our children.

In counselling and psychotherapy, we talk a lot about understanding your reactions - why you're feeling or responding a certain way in a particular moment. That's often the first step towards knowing yourself. It's a bit like the oxygen mask analogy on a plane, you need to put your own mask on first before you can help your child. But modern life makes this really difficult. Parents are often juggling so much that their own needs come last.

I know it's a tricky balance, and I'm not saying parents should suddenly prioritise themselves above everything else. But self-care isn't just about bubble baths and spa days, it's about doing the hard stuff too. It's having the difficult conversations, acknowledging emotions you might prefer to push aside, and allowing yourself space to process what's going on for you. Small steps can make a big difference.

At the end of the day, if we want our children to develop emotional awareness, we have to be willing to go there ourselves. It's not about getting it perfect. It's about being open to knowing ourselves, alongside them.