As I think of my young son’s future, I often consider, “What can I do, given the risks today’s teens face, to bolster him now?”

Having a 20-year old who survived a tumultuous adolescence, and a 6-year old in the heart of innocence has its advantages. I’m wiser, maybe, but more importantly, humbled. I don’t harbor the illusions of the other parents in his peer group who have only young children (“Mine will be different!”), though sometimes I wish I did. I know a child can transform overnight, whether it’s trauma, drugs and alcohol, or simply puberty. It’s shocking, and as parents who must respond quickly, we often don’t have time to recover from one blow before the next wave hits.

How can we approach adolescence with a longer runway and a little more realism?

Many of us do our best to create active bonds that encourage honest conversation and real emotion. My son, and my daughter did this as well, often opens up right before bed. That’s when he has shared about times he felt alone at school, or when a kid made fun of him for having long hair. The other place my kids open up is while we are driving. Someone once told me that a lot of parenting takes place in the rear view mirror, and that is so true.

But when I think about how to bridge those deep talks with real life out there in the world, it’s scary. We can’t fully protect them, and the moment we hand them phones, it’s exposure to information that [even when we set limits, monitor activity, and teach media literacy] we can’t control. While your kid is grounded at home, at school they are using friends’ phones to log into their social media sites, carrying on without missing a streak.

Before I list the statistics and we get overwhelmed by the expanding loss of control, let’s go back to being six years old. Not just parenting younger ones, but being young ourselves. Remember the green grass and skinned knees full of gravel? Remember the hide and seek behind trees while your parents were hollering for you to come in for dinner? Or for the locals who aren’t east coast transplants like me, those golden-glow beach sunsets that made summer seem endless?

Innocence can be protected and nurtured. Innocence gives kids great memories to reach for later. Isn’t it great to feel into ours? As a mom, it’s hard not to get caught up in the to do lists and remember that my little one is right smack in the middle of building those memories. His joy is essential to him being a whole person, and me being present with him in it means everything.

“Childhood is the best of all the seasons of life, and the longer it lasts with happy memories, the stronger the emotional stability in adulthood.''

-Venugopal Acharya

The other piece is resilience. Innocence and resilience don’t always go together. I consider myself a pretty resilient person, but I also recognize that much of it came from very real trauma. I am personally a survivor of a host of abuses and have gradually and gratefully overcome them to be a pretty functional adult. But I don’t want my son to have to face anything like what I did to develop resilience! Can it be earned in other ways? What is resilience anyway?

Here is how the APA defines resilience: the process and outcome of successfully adapting to difficult or challenging life experiences, especially through mental, emotional, and behavioral flexibility and adjustment to external and internal demands. In physics, resilience is the ability of an elastic material (such as rubber) to absorb energy (such as from a blow) and release that energy as it springs back to its original shape.

How can I make a boy into rubber in a world where his every need is more than met?

For us it’s back to the basics. I try not to do for him what he can do for himself. When he asks, “Mom can I have some water?” I stop myself from serving him and remind him of where the water bottles are. When he whines “I can’t” about the tedious chores of life like brushing teeth and putting on shoes, I don’t cave. When he tells me a kid hit him at school, I don’t say what I want to say [“Who is he, who is his mother, where does he live”], I ask, “And how did you deal with that?”

I don’t really know what works and doesn’t, I can’t say that my daughter struggled because of a lack of resilience, but what I can say is that resilience allowed her to regain self-confidence and independence. For a kid that was not promised a future at all based on her choices and behaviors to be navigating her own path forward with determination and pride, it takes grit. It takes guts. And whatever I can do to guarantee my son a clearer path into his own soul, I will do. Even if it kills me that I can’t indulge my desire to wrap him up like a burrito and hand him a sippy cup. It doesn’t serve him. He’s a big kid now. He has a tough world to thrive in, and the best thing I can do for him is to let him know he’s got all the skills, intelligence and capacity do just that.