The booklet landed on our kitchen table with the soft authority of institutional concern. All pastelly colours, roundy fonts, a cartoon brain doing yoga. “Wellbeing Week” it announced. It would seem that wellbeing is like a seasonal fruit, briefly abundant in the merry month of March.
The theme this year is Resilience. The word appears so often in this week’s homework it’s starting to feel like a command.
Resilience is what the child must develop, we are told. Resilience is the answer to trauma, stress, to anxiety, to “setbacks.” Resilience is the quiet hero of the modern classroom, the invisible muscle to be trained and stretched and flexed.
So be resilient, the say. Resilient against what, we say?
Against hunger? Against eviction notices? Against mouldy homes? Against emergency accommodation? Against a bill that can’t be paid? Against the fact that some children arrive at school having already expended their daily emotional energy navigating adult crises not of their making?
How does the homeless child be resilient?
The textbook doesn’t say. But it offers breathing exercises.
How does the hungry child do resilience?
It suggests journaling.
There’s something almost impressive in the ideological sleight of hand. Structural violence, systemic, engineered, measurable, is translated into a personal deficit. If the child struggles, it is not because the world is arranged in a manner hostile to their flourishing. It is because their “coping skills” require further development. The problem is relocated from the realm of political economy to the interior of the child’s psyche, where it can be managed with worksheets, stressballs, and mindful colouring in.
Resilience out of this school textbook teaches the child to endure, to adapt, to internalise instability as a natural condition. The task is to become weatherproof. Just DO NOT question the storm.
And so the curriculum aligns itself neatly with the broader imperatives of neoliberal governance. Social protections are all but gone, public goods all but gone, but the child is reassured that they possess within themselves the tools necessary to cope. The contradiction is resolved not by altering our material conditions,no, but by recalibrating our expectations. You may not have security, but you can have resilience. You may not have justice, but you can have mindfulness on an app.
What is conspicuously absent to families like ours, is the language of resistance.
Resistance would require naming the forces that produce distress and trauma. It would necessitate a vocabulary of power, class, exploitation. It would imply that the appropriate response to unjust conditions is not adaptation, but transformation. This is, of course, far less convenient. A resilient child endures but a resistant child questions. One is governable, the other potentially dangerous.
So resilience is elevated, celebrated, institutionalised. It is safer to teach children how to regulate their breathing than how to recognise exploitation. Safer to encourage gratitude journals than to ask why gratitude is necessary in the face of preventable deprivation.
The irony, of course, is that what is being called resilience is often nothing more than survival under duress. Children have always been capable of this, because they have had to be. What is new is the insistence that this survival be reframed as a personal achievement rather than a collective failure.
“Wellbeing Week” is coming to an end amarach. The leaflet will be chucked in the bin, or recycled for Wellbing Week 2027 (if we survive WW3,that is), and the conditions remain intact. The child returns to school, to home, to whatever precarious or unstable arrangement awaits them. They have been equipped, at least, with the knowledge that if they falter, the fault lies within.
Resilience, not resistance. Endure, do not transform. Adapt, do not demand.
And somewhere, in the margins of the worksheet, the unasked question lingers:
What might happen if, instead of teaching children to survive the storm, we taught them to end it?