Teaching Resilience to Kids: What FDR and Our Hero Camp Counselors Have in Common

At Perfectly Me Hero Camp, we spend a lot of time thinking about what resilience actually looks like — not the bumper-sticker version, but what it looks like in the room, in real time, when a plan falls apart and every kid is watching the adult's face to decide what to feel. I've been thinking about that question a lot lately, because of a Zoom call with a volunteer, and a documentary about Franklin Roosevelt.

How Adults Respond to Hard Moments Matters More Than You Think

I had a Zoom meeting yesterday with a volunteer who wants to come back to Hero Camp this summer. I'd been thinking about this conversation for weeks, because last summer I'd noticed something that worried me: whenever an experiment failed or a plan fell apart, she got visibly negative. And the campers saw it. They watched her face fall, heard the sigh, picked up the energy. Kids are sponges — they don't just learn from what we teach, they learn from how we respond when things go sideways.

So before inviting her back, I asked her to grow in one specific area: the willingness to be positive, curious, and resilient when things don't go as planned, no matter how hard that is in the moment.

That night, I sat down to watch a documentary about Franklin Delano Roosevelt. And I couldn't stop thinking about my counselor.

The Forgotten Man

FDR challenged something that, until him, most Americans took as a basic fact of life: that the government's job was to protect big business and big banks, and that the common person was on their own. He insisted on a different idea — that the government had a real obligation to the "forgotten man." The farmer whose crops weren't selling. The factory worker whose plant had shuttered. The widow with no safety net. The Black sharecropper. The kid who couldn't afford school.

This was a radical reorientation. It built Social Security. It built the WPA. It built rural electrification. It built a country in which ordinary people could believe the government saw them.

And here is the question I can't shake: would he have had that vision if he had never gotten polio?

What Polio Took, and What It Gave

FDR was, by every available account, a charming, ambitious, somewhat shallow young man before 1921. Wealthy. Hyannis. Harvard. Patrician. The kind of person who'd been told his whole life that the world was arranged for his benefit — and who had little reason to doubt it.

Then, at thirty-nine, polio took the use of his legs.

Suddenly the man who'd glided through life had to ask other people to lift him. He had to plan how he'd enter a room. He had to grieve a body that no longer did what he asked of it. He had to sit with helplessness — not as an abstract concept, but as a daily, hourly fact.

And here's what's remarkable: he didn't just survive it. He let it form him.

He spent years at Warm Springs, Georgia, in the rehabilitation pools with other polio survivors — many of whom had nothing. No money for treatment. No family resources. No political connections. People who'd been forgotten. He bought the property and turned it into a place where they could be treated regardless of means.

The man who'd been raised to think the world was arranged for him spent a decade learning, in his own body and in the bodies of the people beside him, that the world was not arranged for most people. And that someone had to do something about it.

That is the move I want to focus on. Not the suffering itself — suffering by itself doesn't make anyone great. Plenty of people get sick and stay bitter. What made FDR was that he let polio teach him to see. He let it relocate him — from the center of his own story to the side of the pool, next to people the country had decided didn't matter. And once he saw them, he couldn't stop seeing them. The forgotten man wasn't a campaign slogan. The forgotten man was the guy who couldn't afford the treatment FDR was getting because his family had money.

That's the leadership question polio answered for him: who am I actually for?

What Our Counselors Already Know About Teaching Resilience

I asked our counselors at our team dinner recently to write what Perfectly Me Hero Camps stands for in 2026. I gave them index cards and a marker and got out of the way. I want to share a few of the things they wrote, because they answer the same question FDR's polio answered — who is this for? — and they answer it in a way I think he would have recognized.

One counselor wrote: Family. Home. Laughs. Inclusion. Happy Days. Siblinghood.

Another: A place for kids to have fun and free themselves from the everyday stresses of school and life.

Another: People sticking together — helping the kids be an example to the world, using the power of siblinghood.

Another: A camp with community, building life-long skills and character. A place where everyone belongs.

And one card just said, with a smiley face drawn underneath: Youth thinking and growing.

These are not throwaway answers. Most of the counselors who wrote these cards have been with Perfectly Me for years. Some of them came up through our programs as campers and grew into the role. They are not describing a place they read about. They are describing a place they have helped build, with their own hands and patience, summer after summer.

And here is the part I want to be honest about: that "place where everyone belongs" was not built in easy summers. It was built in the hard ones.

The Cost of "Everyone Belongs"

When you build a camp that means it when it says everyone belongs, you don't get to pick which kids show up. You get the kid who is shining and the kid who is struggling. You get the kid whose anxiety is so big that the only way she knows how to manage it is to break the RC car another camper just built. You get the kid whose tower of blocks gets knocked over by another kid mid-meltdown, and now you have two upset kids and a watching group and a lesson plan that is, suddenly, not the lesson plan anymore. You get the kid who is having the kind of day a six-year-old should not have to have, in a body that does not yet know how to carry it, and you have to figure out — in real time, in front of everyone — how to love that kid without losing the other kids who are scared or sad or angry at what just happened.

This is the work. Not the curriculum. Not the schedule. The work is what happens when the schedule breaks.

And the veteran counselors on my team have done this work for years. They have sat with the kid who broke the thing. They have helped the kid whose thing got broken. They have stayed in community with kids who were, in that moment, very hard to be in community with. They have figured out how to hold the room — the broken thing, the upset kid, the watching kids, the lesson plan in shambles — without letting it tip into chaos or shame.

That is why, when I asked them what Perfectly Me stands for, they wrote siblinghood and sticking together and a place where everyone belongs. Because they have personally paid the price of meaning those words. They know what it costs and they know what it produces. They have watched, over years, the kid who used to break things become a kid who builds things. The kid who used to melt down become a kid who can name his feelings. The kid who couldn't be in community become the kid who is now welcoming the next hard kid into community.

That is the New Deal, scaled to a classroom.

The Same Move, on a Smaller Stage

Here is what I think connects FDR to the cards on my wall.

FDR did not invent compassion. He inherited a country that had compassionate people in it, and policies that occasionally noticed the poor. What he did was reorient who the government was for. He moved the forgotten man from the margins of the national story to the center of it. And he could do that because polio had moved him — from the center of his own story to the side of a rehabilitation pool, where he met the people the system didn't see.

Perfectly Me is, in its own small way, trying to do the same thing for childhood. The kid who feels invisible at school. The kid who doesn't fit the box. The kid whose anxiety expresses itself in ways that other adults have decided are unacceptable. The kid whose meltdown got him sent home from somewhere else. The kid who has been told, in a hundred quiet ways, that the world isn't really arranged for him. We are saying: here, you are at the center of the story. Here, you are the hero. Here is family, home, siblinghood, a place where you belong — even on the day you break the RC car. Especially then.

We can only say that if the people running the camp have done the FDR move themselves. Have let something hard relocate them. Have stayed at the side of the pool — or at the side of the kid having the meltdown — long enough to actually see who is there.

What Resilience Really Asks of the Adult in the Room

This is what I was really asking of my counselor on that Zoom call.

I wasn't asking her to smile more. I wasn't asking her to fake positivity. I was asking her to do the thing the veterans on my team have already done — the thing FDR did at Warm Springs. To stay in the room when it gets hard. To let a failed experiment, or a hard kid, or a plan that fell apart, teach her something about who she is and who she is for. And then to stand back up in front of the campers and model what a person looks like who has been formed by hard moments rather than crushed by them.

Because here is what the veterans understand and what I want her to understand: the kid who is hardest to be in community with is often the kid who needs the community most. The kid who broke the RC car is testing whether everyone belongs really means everyone. The kid who melts down is asking, in the only language she has, whether we are going to stay. And the kid watching it all unfold from the side — the quiet one, the careful one, the one trying to figure out how the world works — is learning, in that exact moment, what adults do when things get hard.

If the adult in the room sighs and gives up, that watching kid learns: when life doesn't work, adults bail.

If the adult in the room gets curious and steady and stays, that watching kid learns something else. They learn the same thing the country learned from FDR at the podium, braced and gripping and in pain, telling them the only thing they had to fear was fear itself: it is possible to be formed by hardship into something more useful, not less.

That is the lesson I am asking my volunteer to be able to teach this summer. Not because I want to grade her. Because the next hard kid is coming. And the kids around him are watching her face to find out what they should believe.

Could FDR have gotten there another way?

Maybe. People do sometimes develop deep empathy without personal hardship. And FDR had genuine gifts — political instinct, a great voice, real intelligence — that polio didn't give him.

But I think the FDR who never got polio would have been a competent, charming, forgettable president. A man who managed the existing system rather than reimagining it. The presidency that gave us the New Deal required someone who had personally encountered the gap between what the system promised and what it delivered. Polio walked him across that gap.

The same is true on a smaller scale at Perfectly Me. A counselor who has never had to choose curiosity over collapse, resilience over resignation, can say the hero values out loud. But they can't teach them. The kids will know. The kids always know.

That's why my veterans can write siblinghood on an index card and mean it — because they have earned the word. And that's why I asked my volunteer to grow before coming back. Because I want her to earn it too.

What I Took Away From All of This

The cards on my wall describe a place built for the forgotten kid. The documentary on my TV described a presidency built for the forgotten man. Both required someone willing to be relocated by hardship — to let a hard thing teach them to see people they hadn't seen before, and then to build something around what they finally saw.

FDR didn't choose polio. My counselor didn't choose a failed experiment. None of us choose most of the hard things that happen to us. But we do choose what we let them make of us. We choose whether to be relocated by them or just resentful about them.

I hope she comes back this summer. I hope she joins the veterans who have already learned what it costs and what it produces to be a person who stays in the room when it gets hard. I hope she gets the chance to be one of the adults a kid is watching, on a hard day, to find out what to believe about the world.

Because every kid at Perfectly Me is, in some way, somebody's forgotten man. And we are the New Deal.