As parents, we want our children to grow up to be strong and resilient. But what does this mean? What is an emotionally healthy child and how do we help our children develop in to the best people they can be?

Surprisingly, this does not mean our children will always be happy, compliant and well-mannered. Emotionally healthy kids have bad moments and bad days, just like adults do. They thing that differentiates an emotionally healthy child is the child’s ability to recover from disappointment, hurt or distress and hove a positive sense of self despite the bad days. Our job as parents is not to plan our our children’s lives so that they live conflict free, but rather to help our children figure out how to properly negotiate or deal with difficult situations that may come their way.

There are several important elements of emotional health and we need to be able to help our children develop in all of these areas. These include the ability to have boundaries, to have healthy reciprocal relationships, to respond to others with empathy and to understand social cues.

Parents need to model emotional health to their children first. Then, after many teaching moments, children will eventually begin to follow their example.

To raise emotionally healthy children parents need to provide the following:

Structure-    This sounds simple, but can be the most difficult task for many parents. In short, this means having rules and sticking to them. This includes consistent schedules, consistent expectations for behavior, consistent rules, consistent consequences for breaking the rules and consistent values.

Nurturing-    Other than structure, this is the most important element in creating an emotionally healthy child. Children need to know that they are special, precious and worth the time to take care of them. They need to be physically and emotionally nurtured. This includes daily hugs, bandaging their hurts and cuddling. Taking care of your child’s basic needs lets your child know you care. Nurturing should also be fun. Take time everyday to play with your younger children and for older children, make sure you spend uninterrupted time focusing on them. Even 10 minutes a day will provide an enormous emotional "booster shot" for your child.

Empathy-    Empathy is crucial for healthy emotional development. Model it often with your child by showing empathy for his or her feelings and experiences. Reflect sad or angry feelings when your child is upset. Rather than minimizing a child’s feelings or teasing your child when she is distressed, respond with empathy. Try hugging your child and saying, "You feel sad right now." This is so simple, but it works amazingly well.

Reciprocity-    This is the give and take in relationships. During the first years of life children learn to read and respond to other people’s cues. It is important for parents to help their children understand what other people are feeling and how the child should respond. Identifying feelings for your child helps them understand how their actions impact others.

As parents, we should consider the messages we are giving to our children through our words and actions. Do our words say that our child is a strong, capable and worthwhile person? We can raise emotionally healthy children who believe they are worthwhile and give them the tools to survive hard times intact.