I Didn't Need to Be Resilient, I Needed to Be Seen

I was that kid.

Good grades, good friends, always in an activity, always described as "so resilient." From the outside, it looked like I had it figured out. On the inside, I was a perfectionist who felt like I had to earn every bit of approval I got, and who learned pretty early that the loud, opinionated parts of me weren't the parts anyone wanted to see.

Nobody was worried about me. Why would they be? I was fine.

That's the exact word I want to talk about this week: fine.

I sat down with Stacy Schaffer, a children's therapist and the author of With Love from a Children's Therapist, and we spent our whole conversation circling one idea. "Kids are resilient" has become something we say to reassure ourselves, not something we actually teach. And the kids who seem the most fine, the easy ones, the well behaved ones, are sometimes the ones quietly coping alone.

Resilient and shut down aren't the same thing

Stacy said something early on that I haven't stopped thinking about. She described herself as a kid as "shiny." Good grades, good friends, all the outward markers of a kid who had it together. Inside, she was in real pain, and nobody around her could tell, because shiny looks a lot like resilient from the outside.

That distinction matters, because I think a lot of us are unintentionally rewarding the shine instead of asking what's underneath it. A kid who never complains, never falls apart, never asks for help isn't automatically a kid who's okay. Sometimes that's exactly what coping alone looks like.

Stacy's definition of real resiliency has two parts, and we tend to only teach the first one. She says it's the belief that you can get through something hard, plus knowing what to do and who to go to. That second half is the one we skip. Independence without support isn't the same as resilience. It's a kid who's learned that asking for help doesn't work, so they've stopped asking.

We all want to be seen, not fixed

The part of this conversation that hit me hardest was when Stacy talked about a hard time she went through, and a friend who kept missing the point. Her friend meant well, offered advice, tried to relate, but none of it landed, because Stacy didn't need a solution in that moment. She needed someone to sit with what she was actually feeling.

She pointed out that we do this to kids constantly. A kid falls and we either overreact or brush it off, and both responses skip the same step: noticing what's actually happening for them before we react to it. To truly see a kid is to let their feeling exist long enough for them to feel understood, before we jump to fixing it.

I think about this with my own son. When he's struggling with something, my instinct is to solve it fast, because I don't love watching him hurt. But solving it fast can accidentally tell him his feeling was a problem to be handled instead of something worth hearing out.

Raised by humans, with a margin of error

Here's the part I want every parent reading this to actually sit with. Stacy said parents call her convinced they've broken their kid, and her response is always the same: your kid isn't broken, and your kid is being raised by humans, so there's going to be a margin of error.

That line stuck with me because I think humility might be the most underused parenting tool we have. Not knowing everything isn't a parenting failure. Getting your child support, whether that's a teacher, a therapist, or another trusted adult, isn't a sign you couldn't handle it. It's one of the most resilient things you can model.

I didn't grow up with that kind of support, and I can trace a lot of who I became back to that gap. It's a big part of why I want something different for my own kids, and honestly, why conversations like this one still catch me off guard with how personal they feel.

This one might land differently depending on who you are, whether it explains something about your own childhood or reframes how you see the kid in your house who pushes back on everything. Either way, it leaves you with a better working definition of resilience, one you can build toward.

Listen to my full conversation with Stacy Schaffer wherever you get your podcasts.

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