How to Teach Your Children Resilience and Grit

SALT LAKE CITY, Utah (ABC4 News) how do you teach your children resilience and grit? The park city school district plans to focus on that next week in all of their classrooms.

Intervention counselor Samantha Walsh and Fatima Doman the founder, CEO and author of authentic strengths joined Emily Clark on Good Morning Utah to talk about what is takes to teach your children these values.

In collaboration with the Park City School District, The Speedy Foundation, and many other community partners, CONNECT is proud to present Resilience Week in Park City. The week will include the screening of three powerful, award winning films to create crucial dialogue within our community. All of the events are free and the entire family is welcome.

This is part of Park City School District's continued push to help our incredible students build resilience and grit. The original focus this year was to strengthen our students' mental health and to expand resources dedicated to accomplishing that; their September tragedies absolutely highlighted the extreme need our kids have for help. Superintendent Conley and the district have doubled down on efforts.

The week begins on Monday, March 6th with a screening of Hope Lives: Preventing Teen Suicide beginning at 5:30 PM at the Park City High School Lecture Hall. Utah's suicide rate has always been higher than that of the rest of the nation. Among teens ages 10 to 17, the suicide rate has tripled in less than a decade. On average two Utah teens attempt to end their lives every day. 

On Tuesday March 7th,  they'll screen Paper Tigers beginning at 6:00pm in the Jim Santy Auditorium at the Park City Library. More than two decades ago, two respected researchers published the game-changing Adverse Childhood Experiences Study. It revealed a troubling but irrefutable phenomenon: the more traumatic experiences the respondents had as children (such as physical and emotional abuse and neglect), the more likely they were to develop health problems later in life.

Finally, on Wednesday, March 8th, they'll screen the new documentary, Resilience: The Biology of Stress & The Science of Hope beginning at  5:30 PM at the Park City High School Lecture Hall.  Resilience reveals that toxic stress can trigger hormones that wreak havoc on the brains and bodies of children, putting them at a greater risk for disease, homelessness, prison time, and early death.