Why We Keep Asking Children to Be Resilient Instead of Fixing the Systems That Harm Them

Resilience.

It's become one of those words that sounds unquestionably positive.

We celebrate resilient children. We admire resilient families. We fund resilience programs. We write policies about resilience. We train professionals to build resilience.

And don't get me wrong—resilience matters.

The ability to recover from setbacks, adapt to challenges, and keep moving forward in difficult circumstances is an important life skill.

But lately, I've been wondering if we've become a little too comfortable with the word.

In fact, I wonder whether we have become so focused on teaching children to be resilient that we've stopped asking why they need to be so resilient in the first place.

Because resilience was never meant to be a substitute for safety.

It was never meant to excuse dysfunction.

And it certainly was never meant to become the solution to systems that continue to fail children.

The Child Who Keeps "Bouncing Back"

In child protection, education, mental health, and disability services, we often hear stories about resilient children.

The child who has experienced neglect but keeps smiling.

The child who has witnessed family violence but still comes to school every day.

The child who has moved through multiple placements but somehow continues to trust adults.

We call them resilient.

And they are.

But sometimes I wonder whether that label allows us to feel a little too comfortable.

Because every time we praise a child for surviving something, we should also be asking why they had to survive it at all.

A child should not need extraordinary resilience to access education.

A child should not need extraordinary resilience to feel safe at home.

A child should not need extraordinary resilience to navigate a mental health system with waiting lists that stretch for months.

Yet increasingly, that seems to be exactly what we're asking of them.

The System Loves Resilience

Let's be honest.

Resilience is attractive to systems because it's relatively cheap.

Fixing poverty is hard.

Fixing housing shortages is hard.

Fixing overloaded child protection systems is hard.

Fixing inequitable access to health, education, disability, and mental health services is hard.

Teaching children coping strategies?

That's much easier.

Far cheaper.

Far less politically complicated.

And while coping strategies absolutely have their place, they cannot become a substitute for meaningful change.

Teaching a child to swim is important.

But if we keep throwing them into deeper and deeper water, eventually we have to ask whether the problem is the child—or the river.

The Burden We Place on Children

Sometimes I think we've quietly shifted the responsibility.

Instead of asking:

"How do we create safer environments?"

We ask:

"How do we make children more resilient?"

Instead of asking:

"How do we reduce trauma?"

We ask:

"How do we help children cope with trauma?"

Instead of asking:

"How do we fix the system?"

We ask:

"How do we help children survive the system?"

Can you see the difference?

One approach focuses on changing the environment.

The other focuses on changing the child.

And when we're not careful, resilience becomes another way of saying:

"We know things are difficult, but we're going to need you to adapt."

That is an enormous burden to place on children.

The Children We Don't See

There is another problem with our obsession with resilience.

Not every child is resilient in ways that adults recognise.

Some children become withdrawn.

Some become angry.

Some disengage from school.

Some struggle with anxiety, depression, self-harm, substance use, or challenging behaviours.

When children don't "bounce back," we often see them as failures.

But perhaps they are not failing.

Perhaps they are responding exactly as any human being would when exposed to chronic stress, instability, trauma, or neglect.

Maybe the problem isn't that they lack resilience.

Maybe the problem is that we've normalised circumstances that no child should have to endure.

Resilience Is Not the Goal

This might sound controversial, but I don't actually think resilience should be the goal.

Safety should be the goal.

Connection should be the goal.

Belonging should be the goal.

Stable housing should be the goal.

Accessible healthcare should be the goal.

Effective education should be the goal.

Supportive communities should be the goal.

Resilience is what develops when children experience challenges within environments that are fundamentally safe and supportive.

It should not be what we rely on when those environments fail.

What If We Asked Better Questions?

What if instead of asking:

"How can we make children more resilient?"

We asked:

"What barriers are we expecting children to overcome that adults should be removing?"

What if we asked why families are waiting months for support?

Why schools are carrying responsibilities they were never designed to carry?

Why children in rural and remote communities continue to receive fewer services?

Why families have to fight systems that were supposedly built to help them?

What if resilience was no longer our first answer?

Children Deserve Better

I want children to be resilient.

Of course I do.

Life will always contain disappointment, setbacks, grief, and challenge.

But I also want us to stop using resilience as a reason not to tackle the bigger problems.

Because children should not have to be resilient enough to survive systems that adults have the power to improve.

They should not have to carry the consequences of our policy failures, funding decisions, service gaps, or political inaction.

Children deserve more than survival.

They deserve environments where they can thrive.

And perhaps the most important question we can ask ourselves is this:

If a child needs extraordinary resilience just to get through an ordinary day, what does that say about the world we have built around them?

Maybe it's time we stopped admiring resilience long enough to start creating the conditions that make it less necessary.

Because children deserve more than our admiration.

They deserve our action.