Stability and Flexibility

What makes our lives stable or flexible? What makes the difference? Why is it that stability to one person is chaos to another? And when people think that their life is very stable and settled, another might think it is too rigid. How do find the happy medium for ourselves?
We can find the right mix of:
- flexibility and change
- individuality and connectedness
- autonomy and predictability
Without flexibility everything becomes a crisis. But with too much flexibility nothing becomes a crisis, which is also a problem I think. Children enjoy having stability, as a matter of fact- they seem to thrive on it. We also need to give children a chance to self-regulate. If they are over-regulated, when given the chance, the child will swing to the other end of the spectrum. Sometimes we let the things that we don't like become the forbidden fruit, which makes it all the more wanted by the child.
Children with autism, and some other disabilities, thrive on structured days. They are at the far extreme. They need the rigid schedule to function. We all need some sense of rigidity, but also letting ourselves be flexible when the time comes that we need to change.

Resiliency and Risks

One of the main things that we correlate with Risk is poverty. We can see a lot of things that seem to cause the major risks associated with it.
Some are:
- malnutrition
- gang violence
- lower education
- drop out of school
- substance abuse
- single parent families
- poor schools
- domestic abuse
- low birth weight

We can see that the places that we feel are full of poverty are sometimes associated these characteristics. Why? Why are they at such a higher risk? What puts them there? We could say money, or we could say it is all circumstantial. I feel that there is a tradition that happens in families that they don't even realize that they practice. I have learned in past classes that it typically takes 3 generations for a family to leave poverty. I think that we don't realize how much influence our parents and grandparents have on our future.

So what makes us Resilient? I got talking with my husband about how we can make our children be more resilient, and we decided that we wanted our children to be optimistic, have good work ethic, and understand their emotions. These are how we want our children to learn resiliency. I can see that for me, becoming resilient was part of being the 5th child of 11. I didn't have a lot one on one time with my parents, so I had to deal with a lot of things on my own. I was still very supported, but I still learned a lot about taking care of things by myself. I think that if we let our children have the chance to do some things on their own then they have more experience under their belt.