“...resilience is the ability to live creatively, with joy and satisfaction, whatever our circumstances. It’s like a beautiful flame inside of us that just needs fanning to take hold and transform any challenge into a gift. It’s a resource that when you call on it, can help you grow your life in surprising and beautiful ways.” - Becky DeGeorge, teacher and life coach
Writing for Resiliency: Young Readers as Survivors
By Sheila O'Connor, author of Keeping Safe the Stars
"[The Boxcar children] gathered dishes from the dump, made beds and brooms from pine needles, earned money for the family, found food, created their own home to replace the one they’d lost. They had integrity and courage, perseverance and imagination—all the qualities I longed for as a child.
Revisiting that story, I realized the deep impression that book had left on my young spirit, how much those resourceful children had informed the life I tried to live then, and later on the books I hoped to write.
For me, kids-on-their-own is more than a literary invention; it’s the life I lived, and the life countless kids still live now. In more ways than we’re able to imagine, kids get themselves to school, find food, feed their families, care for siblings, face challenges and miraculously find ways to solve problems for themselves.
Of course, I wish that it weren’t so; I always wish a parent or a teacher or a grandparent would step in to save the day, and often times they do, but just as often kids have to wait for help. Or ask. I see it in the schools; I see it on the street.
Kid survivors are everywhere. They’re in every neighborhood and school, they’re rich and poor, and too many of them have to keep their secrets to themselves.
When I write, whether I’m writing books for grown-ups or kids, a part of me is always in conversation with those children, survivor kids, kids who want to find their stories in a book."
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