How to Foster Resilience in Children, What is Resilience?

Our children are our everything, but try as much as we might, we can't protect them forever. As the saying goes, "into each life some rain must fall."

While we can't protect our children from ever experiencing hardships or traumatic events, we can prepare them. There are things we can do to increase the likelihood that when hardships and tragedy eventually do touch their lives they are able to respond effectively, getting back to their lives with minimal disruption.

But before we can do anything else, we have to know what resilience is.

So, what is resilience?

In the world of psychology research there are many competing definitions of what resilience means. One that I have used in my research, that I think most academics and lay-people can agree upon, is this: the ability to return to baseline functioning after disruption from one or more adverse events.

One important thing to note is that the "adverse events" in this definition is not exclusive to major life events such as a car accident or the death of a loved one. Little events, especially when there are many of them and especially when they happen early in life, can have a big impact.

In the world of psychology research, there has been plenty of debate about resilience. One interesting point is that even if you can measure someone's symptoms after a traumatic event, you probably don't know what their symptoms were like before that traumatic event. Were they always depressed? Were they anxious already and just hadn't been diagnosed? Usually researchers can only measure someone after a major event and only guess at what their functioning was like beforehand.

Another point of contention that's relevant for parents is the idea of resilience being a trait or a process. Trait theorists look at things personality traits that could either make someone more or less susceptible to developing psychopathology after a traumatic event. Process theorists of resilience argue that resilience isn't a trait someone has or doesn't have, but a process that they engage in. Like the cliche of someone spending time being sad with friends after a breakup, going to social supports is a process a person engages in to get themselves back to baseline. While there is some truth to both sides of this argument, most researchers now lean towards the process model of resilience. And if something is a process, then it can be learned and improved like any other skill.

For a long time the world of psychology focused on the negative aspects of mental health; researching and defining what happens when things go wrong. Much less attention was paid to identifying when and how things go right. This contributed to an expectation, which lasted for years, that after traumatic events psychopathology was the norm. That belief was dealt a crushing blow by the work of George Bonanno.

A professor at Columbia University in upper Manhattan, George Bonanno and his lab had been researching grief and bereavement since the 1990's. After the 9/11 attacks Dr. Bonanno had his lab cold call random New Yorkers and ask them how they were doing using a standardized questionnaire. They continued calling periodically for 2 years. His findings shocked the world of psychology. They found that, contrary to popular opinion, even after a major traumatic event most people returned to a baseline level of functioning after a short amount of time.

After an initial disruption in functioning, meaning an increase in psychological symptoms, most people returned to baseline functioning.

Understandably, cold-calling New Yorkers is not always going to get you the most honest or in-depth response. They might not have been telling the full story of how they were feeling, no matter how skillful the students doing the structured interviews were or how thoughtfully the questionnaires were made. Thankfully, these results have been repeated. Often.

In a meta-analysis by Galatzer-Levy and colleagues (2018), their research team looked at 54 different studies on resilience and noticed that this trend persisted.

Across all the studies they looked at, only a small percentage (11%) showed chronic symptoms after exposure to a traumatic event. An even smaller group (01%) had a delayed onset of symptoms. The majority (65%) were resilient, experiencing little to no disruption in functioning or major elevation in symptoms. Almost a quarter of the participants (23%) experienced some symptoms but eventually returned to their baseline level of functioning. This implies that without any specific interventions, after a traumatic event an average of 88% of people will be back to their baseline functioning within 2 years. Of that 11% of people who experience chronic, sustained, psychopathology after a traumatic event it is unclear how many of those were experiencing psychopathology before the event. It is possible that among the 11% who have chronic symptoms after trauma are people who were already symptomatic for other reasons or were experiencing sub-threshold symptoms that were not identified or diagnosed yet.

To Summarize:

• Resilience is the process of getting back to baseline after a traumatic or adverse event.

• Resilience is a Process, that you can learn, more than it is a trait, which is harder to change.

• Resilient outcomes are actually the Norm, not the exception.

This last point can help to calm the worried nerves of any beleaguered parent. People are remarkable adaptive creatures and in most cases will find a way to heal and grow after even the most extreme of circumstances. Children too can learn and adapt, so long as they feel loved and supported. So as much as any parent will worry about all the things that can happen to their child, the science says that even when things go wrong, most likely they will be okay.