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Resilience Decoded by Sujata Kelkar Shetty: A review

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by Niharika Yadav.

Adolescence is liminal – set apart from childhood where one is shielded by a designated caretaker, or adulthood, where one is thrown headfirst into challenges but armed with experience and agency. Teenage is marked by heightened curiosity and creativity, yet shadowed by susceptibility to impulse, stress, and overstimulation. This period is especially fraught in the contemporary world where digital technologies, social pressures, and the lingering effects of the pandemic converge.

Sujata Kelkar’s new book ‘Resilience Decoded’ is a timely read and serves as a simple yet impactful guide for parents and caregivers looking to understand and raise resilient adolescents. Kelkar draws on her expertise as a neuroscientist and her experience as a mother to paint a fulsome picture of adolescence – weaving insights from frontier research in adolescent mental health with Indian personal narratives. She argues that the antidote to the rocky road to adolescence is resilience – openness to making mistakes, the ability to experience failure, the capacity to cope with setbacks, and the strength to ‘transform pain into wisdom without letting it steal your softness’.

A succinct read, the book comprises four chapters, each closing with summaries and practical exercises for guardians to engage with their children. These exercises — the 5-Minute Rule, the talk-back method of learning, and the emotional regulation toolkit, among others — provide both insight and a repertoire of functional strategies, reinforcing the book’s central argument for building resilience. The writing is straightforward and jargon-free despite being rooted in scientific research. The frequent variation in structure – from essay-like prose to check boxes and quick bulleted tips – makes the book an easy read for readers and non-readers alike.

The book opens with a basic biological analysis of the teenage brain, likening it to a high-potential, untested Ferrari approaching a rocky road. The metaphor is sharp and continues throughout the book, providing a revelatory parallel. Kelkar argues that a teenage brain is partially developed, relying more on the amygdala (the gas pedal of the brain that drives emotions, impulses, and reward seeking) as compared to the pre-frontal cortex (the brakes of the brain that support planning and impulse control). The teen brain is uniquely sensitive to dopamine, therefore reward seeking, leading teens into high-risk high return situations. This has diverging consequences – while it leads adolescents to explore, undertake new experiences, and learn new activities, it also increases vulnerability to thrill-seeking and addictive behaviours. Similarly, while teenage provides a susceptible window for skill-building, the adolescent brain also faces limitations in executive function, prospective memory, and multi-tasking. The modern world exacerbates these vulnerabilities, with research only recently beginning to provide a full picture of digital harms — social media, online pornography, and video gaming — combined with mounting academic pressure.

The book does not attempt a simplistic answer. Between the two extremes of ignoring the problem and medicalising it, the book argues for a thoughtful approach, rooted in an understanding of science and the human condition. Kelkar pushes caregivers to help adolescents build a culture of resilience. This includes unlearning perfectionism, building a disciplined lifestyle, developing comfort with failure, and moving beyond narratives of victimisation and fairness. Kelkar’s writing distinguishes itself from contemporary self-help discourse and avoids didactic solutioning, binding narratives or a disproportionate focus on correctness and therapy-speak. While she offers activities like co-regulation and affirmation as tools that can be deployed in select circumstances, the fundamental revision she demands is a cultural pivot towards strength and tenacity.

Kelkar talks of resilience not as an antidote to particular challenges adolescents face, but as a disposition they can build to better tackle the variety of challenges that life entails. Resilient parenting means meeting teens with calm and steadiness through life’s ups and downs, much like a driving instructor who stays patient and reassuring when the learner swerves or stalls, helping them find their way back on course with confidence. In making this demand of parents, the book expects resilience from adults too. Parents themselves require both the knowledge and acceptance of life’s randomness, as well as a disproportionate focus on overcoming setbacks, however imperfectly, over preoccupation with injustice and self-pity. It is this overarching outlook towards life that can help adults be better caregivers. In this sense, Kelkar’s book is worthwhile for readers of all ages and identities, who navigate life and look to make sense of it.

There are many small wins the author deserves credit for:

  • The book offers a deep understanding of the theory of change among adolescents, building on Albert Bandura’s Social Learning Theory. Unlike surface-level linguistic fixes that dominate discourse in pop-psychology, Kelkar argues that teens do not learn by simply being told what to do. They absorb resilience, respect, and calm by watching how parents respond. While words open doors, sustained observation of actions truly helps teens internalize parental strength.

  • The book supplements the theory of change with actionable lifestyle solutions that can help build resilience – exercise, nutrition, sleep, and creativity. The book rightly focuses on getting the basics in order. This, Kelkar argues, can go a long way in building cross-generational developmental successes.

  • The book approaches risk wisely – neither shunning it nor embracing it without measure. It recommends that parents guide teens’ risk-taking behaviour through open communication, redirecting them towards positive challenges such as leadership opportunities and group tasks, embedded in a scientific understanding of teenage impulses.

  • The book successfully avoids alarmist storytelling, tempering any tendency towards reactive prescriptions. Accounts of teen suicides are presented in a balanced manner, offering parents tangible insights. The book equips parents with tools for gauging warning signs of deteriorating mental health among teens, but also goes back to the root of the issue – lifestyle choices coded in resilient thinking that can improve propensity to handle failures.

  • Finally, solutions in the book are practical and do not require any external resources. By emphasizing mental remodelling and small changes in day-to-day interactions, the book makes challenges feel both approachable and achievable.

The book also seeks to provide a balanced view of social media. It highlights its positives – like opportunities for community-building and engagement while also drawing on extensive research documenting its adverse effects on teenage mental health. That said, the book leaves room to further delve into several other threads of psychosocial impact of social media on adolescents. Contemporary readers, particularly young parents who actively use social media themselves, may find value in a more detailed exploration. Social media fundamentally rewires the brain to alter attention spans at the expense of memory consolidation, deep reading, and sustained reflection. It increases sensitivity to peer approval and reinforces biases. This has critical implications for cross-gender interactions, which are foundational for adolescent development. Algorithms reinforce existing beliefs, create niche echo chambers, and often contribute to polarisation on social and political issues among young adults. Recent research suggests that GenZ boys and girls hold starkly opposing political beliefs, leading to reduced engagement and growing social gaps. This is especially concerning in the Indian context, where the conversation on cross-gender adolescent interactions is marred with social norms and taboos.

Kelkar rightly advocates for a balanced approach to parenting in the digital age. Rather than imposing blanket bans on smartphones and tablets — devices that many children have already been introduced to, often by their own parents as tools of convenience — she argues for guidance over prohibition. Parents, she suggests, should take an active role in teaching their teenagers how to navigate technology with discernment, communicating openly about both its harms and its benefits. I would add that crucially, this also requires parents to deepen their own understanding of digital culture, so they can offer credible alternatives. For instance, parents should distinguish screen-time with and without narrative. As psychologist and author Jonathan Haidt argues, TV and movies are less harmful than reels and shorts as they engage the mind in a structured way. They are a relatively better alternative to what the book terms as brain rot – which involves mindless scrolling and disconnected dopamine hits. Similarly, parents should encourage teens to replace the reflex of waking up to notifications with the ritual of waking up to a story: keeping a book by the bedside as an invitation to begin the day in a quieter, more intentional way.

While the book urges parents to replace judgement with curiosity, there is more to be said on the issue from an Indian perspective. Indian culture is community-oriented and is yet to cultivate deep respect for individualism and uniqueness. Groupthink is common and we are quick to assume that what works for us should work for everyone else. Judgement, in many ways, is instinctive – used as a tool for social censure and acceptance. Precisely for this reason, it becomes vital for parents to set aside their own notions of what is good, bad, or improper, and create a space where children feel safe to voice even the strangest or most unconventional ideas. Divergent thinking, as the book rightly highlights, is a skill worth nurturing. Beyond that, parents must recognize that the greatest gift they can offer is the absence of rejection or shaming. A non-judgmental environment builds the internal confidence teenagers need to face the world’s ups and downs. This is not to suggest that criticism or opposition has no place; rather, it is about teaching children to engage with dissent without letting it erode their sense of self. The ability to withstand rejection or disagreement while remaining secure in one’s identity is a rare and powerful strength — one that will serve them throughout life.

Parenting guides are often prescriptive to the point of tyranny. Kelkar’s book, by contrast, feels more like a steady companion. It asks little in the way of grand gestures, and instead emphasizes what she calls the “daily work of presence.” For parents, caregivers, and adults seeking to better engage with adolescents, it offers a simple yet insightful weekend read. Fittingly, it closes with a letter from one parent to another, urging them to “hold the line” and continue providing a quiet, trusting sanctuary to their young ones.

Niharika Yadav is a policy consultant based in New Delhi.


Source: https://blog.theleapjournal.org/2025/08/book-review-of-resilience-decoded-by.html


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