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are facing challenges in their lives? What lifts them up when they are down? To whom and where can they go for help? These resources include caring relationships, healthy schools, and access to healthcare among many others. The more the scale is weighted toward the positive, the more the child is protected from the negative factors in his or her world. As an educator, you can likely do little to remove the red boxes from the negative side of the scale. You can’t single-handedly improve a child’s out-of-school environment or cure an illness. But often, you can provide some of the counterbalancing green boxes on the positive side. Indeed, your caring attention and the classroom climate you foster can be a green box in and of itself. And even more often, one of the biggest green boxes you can provide is by being a positive presence in a child’s life. School has the potential to be an incredible support for children if it provides a safe, supportive environment with adults who are consistently present and compassionate. At the same time, we cannot take for granted that schools always provide only green boxes. School is sometimes a place where a child feels bullied, undermined, or less-than. Class can be a place where a child feels anxious, stressed, and unsuccessful. In fact, the school shutdowns and reopenings during COVID-19 revealed that some children found their stress and anxiety was alleviated when they were home. For others, school closures meant they were removed from their support system and they suffered. When a child in your class is exhibiting anxiety or depression, or when you learn about outside adversities, consider all the ways the child’s school experience might be contributing red or green boxes to his or her scale. Shifting the Fulcrum: Resilience-Promoting Skills Shifting the fulcrum is one more fundamental way to make a child’s scale tip toward a positive outcome—which is the core objective of this book. When we provide children with the kind of resilience-promoting skills that this book will explore in depth, we enable them to shift the fulcrum of their scale, making it easier for the positive supports to outweigh the negative experiences. As you improve a child’s social, emotional, communication, and executive function skills, you build his or her internal resilience-promoting capacities. As an individual’s fulcrum shifts, the red boxes are more easily offset by the green.
20 The Educator’s Guide to Building Child & Family Resilience
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