When Resilience Becomes Endurance: Rethinking What We Ask of Children

Have you ever been told to be resilient when what happened was not your fault?

It is a question I have returned to repeatedly over a number of years, particularly when thinking about children, education and the language we use around wellbeing. Resilience has become so familiar within educational discourse that it can feel almost unquestionably positive. We want children to persevere, cope with disappointment, recover from setbacks and continue when something becomes difficult. Of course, there is value in that. Life contains uncertainty, frustration, loss, disappointment and failure, and children need opportunities to discover that difficulty does not necessarily mean defeat.

My discomfort begins when resilience becomes the answer to experiences that should perhaps never have been accepted in the first place.

When children struggle within environments that do not adequately meet their needs, we can ask how to make them more resilient. When young people experience exclusion, disadvantage or repeated failure, we can encourage them to persevere. When the structures surrounding them create pressure or distress, we can offer strategies designed to help them cope.

Yet I increasingly wonder whether another question needs to come first: what exactly are we asking children to become resilient to, and why?

There is an important ethical distinction between supporting a child through the ordinary challenges of growing and learning and expecting that child to repeatedly withstand conditions that adults have the power to examine or change. Resilience becomes problematic when our attention remains fixed on the capacity of the individual child to cope while the environment creating the difficulty remains largely unquestioned.

Davidson and Carlin’s (2019) examination of resilience and youth policy in Scotland is helpful here. They argue that resilience-focused discourse can place considerable emphasis on individual protective factors while giving insufficient attention to the social and structural inequalities surrounding young people. Their critique is not an argument against courage, persistence or strength. Rather, it raises questions about what happens when the solution to adversity becomes making young people better able to withstand it instead of addressing the conditions that produce that adversity in the first place.

This connects closely with questions I have returned to in my own writing about inclusion and social justice. Being present within an educational space is not necessarily the same as belonging within it. A child can be physically included while continually being expected to adapt to structures, expectations and environments that do not adequately recognise their needs, communication, identity or ways of learning. If our principal response is to increase that child's capacity to cope, resilience can unintentionally become another means of locating the problem within the child.

However, I do not think the answer is simply to reject resilience.

Ungar’s (2011) social-ecological understanding of resilience offers a much more nuanced perspective because it moves resilience away from the idea of an exceptional quality residing inside particularly strong individuals. Instead, resilience is understood in relation to the social and physical environments surrounding a person and their access to psychological, social, cultural and material resources. From this perspective, a child's capacity to navigate adversity cannot be separated from the relationships, opportunities and support available to them.

That matters enormously in education. Rather than asking only how we can make a child more resilient, we also have to ask what surrounds that child. Are they known? Do they belong? Are there adults they trust? Can they access the support they require? Are their ways of communicating recognised? Do they have meaningful opportunities to participate and exercise agency? Is the environment responsive enough to change when something is not working?

For me, this is where the conversation becomes deeply Froebelian.

Froebel's philosophy was grounded in an understanding of unity and connectedness. The child was not an isolated learner whose development could be neatly separated from other people, nature, experience and the wider world. His educational thinking understood development holistically, with the individual existing in relationship with others and with the community of which they are part (Froebel, 1887).

Bruce (2021) demonstrates how this principle of unity continues across Froebelian thought, alongside the importance of the whole child, family, community, nature, play and self-activity. This is important because a Froebelian view challenges the idea that the child alone should carry responsibility for adapting successfully to whatever environment adults create around them. If children develop through relationships and interconnected experience, the quality of those relationships and environments becomes part of our pedagogical responsibility.

Community, therefore, is not simply a pleasant backdrop to learning. It matters to how children understand themselves and their place in the world. Children develop a sense of belonging through being known, recognised and valued by others. They encounter uncertainty and difficulty within relationships, and it is through relationships that they can also discover trust, collaboration and support. A child facing difficulty within a responsive community is in a very different position from a child who has effectively been told that managing that difficulty is their individual responsibility.

This is why I have increasingly found myself drawn to the idea of fortitude.

I am not suggesting that we remove the word resilience from education and replace it with another fashionable term. Neither am I proposing fortitude as a new psychological theory. I use it more personally and pedagogically, as a way of distinguishing between simply enduring difficulty and standing within difficulty with intention, agency and support.

Resilience is often associated with the idea of bouncing back. Yet I sometimes wonder whether bouncing back is always what we should want. Back to what? Back into the same environment, the same conditions or the same expectations that created the difficulty?

Fortitude feels different to me because it allows more room for reflection and agency. It can include persistence, but persistence is not automatically the desired outcome. Fortitude might mean continuing with something difficult because it matters. It might also mean recognising that help is needed, approaching something differently, challenging an expectation or acknowledging that the situation itself needs to change.

This distinction becomes particularly visible when I think about play.

Children encounter difficulty and failure continually within meaningful play. Their constructions collapse, their ideas do not always work, plans are renegotiated and other children introduce perspectives that complicate what they had intended. Yet children often return to these experiences with remarkable persistence. Froebel understood play as central to children's development, while contemporary interpretations of Froebelian practice continue to foreground children's self-activity, autonomy, creativity and capacity to make meaning through their own experiences (Froebel, 1887; Tovey, 2016; Bruce, 2021).

Within meaningful play, children are able to make sense of failure. They can reconsider what happened, alter their approach, draw on the ideas of others, seek support or decide to begin again in a different way. They are not simply being asked to tolerate difficulty. They retain agency within it, and that changes the meaning of persistence. Failure becomes something that can be explored and responded to rather than quietly endured.

There is an important difference between the child who rebuilds a construction repeatedly because they are absorbed in solving a problem and the child who repeatedly experiences distress within an educational environment and is expected to develop the resilience to tolerate it. Both may superficially involve persistence, but the child's relationship with the difficulty is fundamentally different.

Meaningful play usually contains some degree of possibility. Children can influence what happens next. They can rethink their intentions, change materials, observe someone else's approach, collaborate, ask for support or decide that the activity has taken them somewhere entirely different. Difficulty exists, but it is not necessarily imposed upon them as something over which they have no influence.

For me, this is where fortitude begins to take shape as a pedagogical idea. It is not merely persisting. It is persistence accompanied by agency, reflection, relationship and meaning.

That final element, relationship, is particularly important because strength should not have to be solitary.

There is something compelling in the familiar story of the resilient individual who succeeds despite everything placed in their way. We quite rightly admire people who survive and flourish in extraordinarily difficult circumstances. Yet there is a danger when exceptional endurance becomes the model against which everybody else is judged.

Children should not have to become extraordinary simply to access ordinary opportunities.

When we celebrate a child for overcoming significant barriers, we should surely also be willing to ask why those barriers were there. Otherwise, the language of resilience can begin to obscure inequality. Those who manage to overcome difficult circumstances are characterised as resilient, while those who struggle under the same weight can too easily be understood as lacking something within themselves.

A Froebelian understanding offers an important challenge to that individualism. The child exists within a web of relationships and connections. This means the relevant question cannot simply be whether an individual child possesses sufficient internal strength. We also have to ask whether the community around the child is sufficiently strong, attentive and responsive to them.

That places responsibility back with us as educators.

If we ask children to reflect on difficulty, then we must also be willing to reflect on the environments we create. If we expect children to adapt, then adults and systems must remain capable of adaptation too. If we genuinely value children's agency, we need to take seriously what they communicate to us, not only through spoken language, but through their participation, relationships, play, withdrawal, behaviour and resistance.

A child who appears unable to cope may be communicating something important about the conditions surrounding them. Their distress does not automatically demonstrate a deficit in resilience. It may indicate that the environment is demanding too much, providing too little, or failing to recognise what that particular child needs.

This has important implications for how we think about mental health and wellbeing in education. Supporting wellbeing cannot mean continually expanding children's toolkit for tolerating increasingly difficult circumstances while leaving those circumstances untouched. Emotional literacy, self-regulation strategies and opportunities to experience challenge can all have value, but they cannot substitute for secure relationships, genuine belonging, appropriate support and environments in which children are known and valued.

Ungar's (2011) ecological perspective is useful precisely because it prevents us from creating a false choice between developing capable children and creating supportive environments. These things are interconnected. People's capacity to respond to adversity is influenced by the resources, relationships and opportunities available within their environment.

That feels closely aligned with Froebel's principle of unity. The child cannot easily be separated from the world in which they are developing. Relationships matter because human development is relational. Community matters because belonging cannot be manufactured by the individual child alone. Agency matters because children are participants in their education rather than passive recipients of what adults decide education should be (Bruce, 2021; Tovey, 2016).

Perhaps, then, my concern has never really been with resilience itself. It is with what happens when resilience is stripped of this relational, structural and ethical context.

When resilience becomes an instruction to cope without questioning why coping is continually necessary, we should be cautious. When children are repeatedly expected to change while the systems surrounding them remain fixed, we should ask whether responsibility has been placed in the right place. When resilience becomes a means of accommodating inequality, inadequate support or harmful practice rather than confronting them, then something has gone wrong.

This is why fortitude continues to resonate with me. It allows challenge and persistence without requiring us to romanticise struggle. It makes room for failure without interpreting failure as personal deficit, and it allows children to encounter difficulty without suggesting that their only successful response is to endure it.

Most importantly, fortitude does not require children to stand alone.

There is a wider significance to this. Children are growing up in a world characterised by considerable uncertainty. Climate change, inequality, conflict, economic pressures and rapid technological and social change will undoubtedly require adaptability, courage and persistence. Education cannot, and should not, protect children from every difficulty they will encounter.

But surely our response to an uncertain world cannot simply be to make children better at enduring whatever comes.

Education can offer something more hopeful. It can create communities in which children understand that human beings are interconnected and that support is not evidence of weakness. It can provide experiences of genuine challenge in which mistakes lead to exploration rather than shame. It can enable children to discover that changing direction does not necessarily mean giving up and that questioning something that is unjust can require considerably more courage than quietly adapting to it.

I want children to experience challenge. I want them to take risks in their learning, encounter failure, persist with difficult problems and discover capacities within themselves that they did not previously know they possessed. But I also want them to understand that strength does not always mean returning quietly to the same conditions and carrying on.

There will be times when strength means persisting, and others when it means asking for help, changing direction or standing alongside someone else. There will also be occasions when courage means recognising that the difficulty does not originate within the individual at all and that something within the wider environment needs to change.

For me, that is the distinction between fortitude and simple endurance.

Fortitude is not about teaching children to withstand everything we place in front of them. It is about enabling them to encounter challenge while retaining agency, connection, meaning and a sense that they do not have to face difficulty alone.

Perhaps the question we need to ask, then, is not simply whether we are raising resilient children.

Perhaps we should also be asking whether we are creating educational communities in which children need to be quite so resilient in the first place.