Raising Resilient Daughters: Lessons from Dr. Tovah Klein on Parenting and Emotional Growth

Unlocking Emotional Strength Through Attunement and Support

In a recent episode of Dads with Daughters, we had the privilege of hosting Dr. Tovah Klein, an esteemed professor at Barnard and author of the insightful book Raising Resilience: How to Help Our Children Thrive in Times of Uncertainty. Our conversation centered on the vital role fathers play in nurturing resilience and emotional strength in their daughters during challenging times. By delving into the essence of resilience, Dr. Klein offers invaluable advice on how fathers can become pillars of support and emotional stability for their children.

The Essence of Resilience

Understanding Resilience

Dr. Klein defines resilience as the ability to adapt, adjust, and be flexible in the face of life's challenges. It is a critical aspect of a child's development, enabling them to navigate adversity with the emotional backing of their parents or caregivers. Rather than shielding children from every hardship, it’s crucial for fathers to allow their daughters to face small adversities, helping them build coping skills and inner strength.

Attunement and Emotional Stability

Attuning to Emotional Needs

Dr. Klein emphasizes the importance of fathers being emotionally attuned to their children. Emotional attunement involves understanding and responding appropriately to a child's emotional cues and needs. For fathers, this means managing their personal stress and emotional states to maintain stability at home. Children require emotional availability and unconditional love to build confidence and mental health, and fathers play a pivotal role in providing this foundation.

Shifting Focus and Modeling Healthy Behaviors

From Work Stress to Home Serenity

A key recommendation from Dr. Klein is the necessity for fathers to shift their focus away from work-related stress before engaging with their children. Modeling healthy behaviors, such as limiting screen time and prioritizing family interactions, sets an example for children to follow. Fathers should strive to be present, listen, and engage in meaningful conversations during everyday moments like car rides or bedtime, turning these instances into opportunities for connection and support.

Embracing Vulnerability

Teaching Through Vulnerability

Dr. Klein underscores the importance of fathers displaying vulnerability. By expressing a range of emotions and acknowledging their struggles, fathers teach their daughters that it's normal to experience and cope with various feelings. This modeling helps children feel validated and understood, fostering emotional intelligence and resilience.

Practical Strategies for Coping

Handling Academic and Social Pressures

When addressing academic struggles or peer conflicts, Dr. Klein advises fathers to listen and validate their children's feelings rather than solve every issue for them. Encouraging daughters to learn from their experiences and take pride in their achievements, even during adversity, builds their problem-solving skills and resilience. Conflict with peers is natural and can lead to stronger friendships as children learn to navigate and resolve disputes on their own.

Empowering Fathers, Empowering Daughters

As fathers, the role you play in your daughters’ lives is immensely significant. By being emotionally attuned, modeling healthy behaviors, and embracing vulnerability, you empower your daughters to develop resilience and emotional strength. These foundational skills enable them to face life's uncertainties with confidence and adaptability. For more resources on enhancing your parenting journey, visit Dr. Klein's website tovahklein.com, and consider joining support communities like The Fatherhood Insider and the Dads with Daughters Facebook group. Together, let’s raise a generation of strong, resilient young women.

TRANSCRIPT

Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:00:05]: Welcome to dads with daughters. In this show, we spotlight dads, resources, and more to help you be the best dad you can be.

Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:00:16]: Welcome back to the dads with daughters podcast, where we bring you guests to be active participants in your daughters' wives, raising them to be strong, independent women. Really excited to have you back again this week. As always every week, I love being able to sit down, talk to you, work with you, and walk on this path that you're on. And I call it a path. It's a journey. We're all on it together as we're raising our daughters to be that those strong, independent women that we want them to be. And it's not always going to be easy. There's gonna be bumps in the road.

Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:00:46]: And but in the end, each and every one of us is working to try to help our children to be able to be self reliant. And one of the topics we're gonna talk about today, resilient as they get older. And every week I love being able to bring you different guests that can help you to do just that. Sometimes we have dads on. Sometimes we have others that have amazing resources that can help you to do just that. And today we've got another great guest with us today. Dr. Tovah Klein is with us today.

Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:01:17]: And Tovah is a professor at Barnard, as well as we're going as well as a author of a new book called raising resilience, How to Help Our Children Thrive in Times of Uncertainty. I'm really excited to have her on and to introduce her to you. Tovah, thanks so much for being here today.

Dr. Tovah Klein [00:01:40]: Oh, thank you for having me. I'm excited to be here.

Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:01:42]: Well, I'm excited to have you here as well. Because as you heard, this podcast is all about raising strong, independent women. And part of that is being able to give our kids the keys to, well, I'm gonna say the castle in regards to helping them to be resilient in the things that they're going to come up against. And there are definitely going to be things that they're going to come up against. And there's some of those are gonna be positive. Some may be negative and some may be somewhere in between. And I'm really excited to be able to delve a little bit deeper into this book that you've put out into the world. But I think I wanna step back in time just a little bit.

Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:02:16]: And first I wanna have you define resiliency because you know, this book is called raising resilience and every person that hears that word resilience may have a different thought in their mind of what that means. And then I'd love to hear your origin story. I wanna hear why this topic and why you wanted to put all the time, passion, effort into putting this out into the world?

Dr. Tovah Klein [00:02:37]: So when I think of resilience, what I really think about is the whole person, the whole child. And resilience is not like a trait or a dose or something that you say, you know, I'm 1 or I'm a 6. It's actually a part of who we raise our children to be. It's about adaptability, adjustment, flexibility. You can think of it as opening up their thinking, but it's being able to move with whatever life gives them. And as you just said, life's gonna give them good and not so good. And so, really, when we think about preparing our children for life, we love them, We do all kinds of kind of things for them, but really what we want is for them to be able to handle the hardest parts of life, and that's what we call resilience. It's a process to help them develop it, but also that adjustment, adaptability, flexibility allows them to face hurdles and shift, face hurdles and shift, knowing that they're not alone in the world.

Dr. Tovah Klein [00:03:38]: They're not doing this themselves, but with originally a parent or whoever is the main caregiver, and then in life, other people who can be there for them. So that's really how I think about resilience is this dynamic piece of self that gets developed over time. Actually, I've been in the field for almost 3 decades now working first with young children and parents, and my research was always centered around young children and that really important influence of parents on them. And then as careers change, I started working with, you know, older children and parents, and that just broadened my thinking. And one day came to this sudden realization that really what parents were doing is helping children prepare for uncertainty. Like, every single day is uncertain. And I have kind of 2, I would say, areas that I'm passionate about and I've spent my life in. One is kind of everyday, normal development challenges, stressful moments.

Dr. Tovah Klein [00:04:41]: And then the other piece, which I always saw as related, was working with families in traumatic situations, so either individual trauma from, you know, abuse or hurts, or fleeing a fire or a flood, but also collective trauma. So children and families after 911, I've done work now in COVID, which when I started conceptualizing the book, I had not yet, but, you know, sort of large scale traumatic events. And when I put those 2 together, I realized that the piece that happens in trauma, whether that's a severe crisis and you've just fled a hurricane and those roads washed out, or you're getting through a normal day with 3 children of different ages and you're trying to get out the door, you're always dealing with uncertainty, and it's very destabilizing. And then that what I got to is, like, oh, then what we're doing every single day in our relationship with our child, whether we know it or not, is helping