Greater Good · 4 days ago

A Playful Way to Help Children Learn Resilience

A fourth-grade girl once told educator Jamie Lynn Tatera that whenever she feels upset, she now has Buddy and Snuggles in her head - a dog and a bunny who live, quietly and reliably, in her inner world. In Milwaukee classrooms where 97% of students live in poverty, Tatera has been teaching children self-compassion not as an abstract skill but as a cast of animal characters, each one embodying something children often struggle to offer themselves: the reminder that they are not alone, that their feelings are shared, that kindness is possible even in hard moments. When a child who often spirals ripped her coloring page in half and then recognized, in a flash, that she was having "the Bear habit," she picked the paper up and they taped it back together - a small act that holds the whole logic of the work. What Tatera has found, across years of practice, is that children do not need to be taught resilience so much as given a language for what they already sense, and that the most durable version of that language is one they can hear in their own minds long after the lesson ends. The animals, it turns out, are never just animals - they are the beginning of a compassionate inner voice.