On Resilience: Bending with the Wind

"The oak fought the wind and was broken,
the willow bent when it must and survived."
~Robert Jordan

At one time or another we all come face-to-face with real hardships in life, whether they be social, emotional, financial and/or physical.  It is an inevitability of being human, and something that life’s wisdom gets around to teaching us all. 

How we cope with this adversity is dependent on our ability to manage change and reshape our lives.  To adapt, and be able to bounce back from adversity, which is a central part of the human condition, we must build resilience in children and youth.

As Editor of The Learning Team publication, which reaches over 25 000 parents across our province, I have dedicated the April 2015 edition to exploring the notion of resilience at a time in our history when it is desperately needed, perhaps not just for children but society writ large.

Zolli and Healy[1] (2012) define resilience as “the capacity of a system, enterprise, or a person to maintain its core purpose and integrity in the face of dramatically changed circumstances,” and see resilience as “preserving adaptive capacity (p. 8)—the ability to adapt to changed circumstances while fulfilling one’s core purpose, which is an essential skill in an age of unforeseeable disruption and volatility” (p.9).

Complex societal shifts are now coinciding with a growing body of research that has documented a steady increase in the rates of depression, anxiety and other mental health disorders among children and youth across North America. According to Jean Twenge[2] five to eight times as many high school and post-secondary students meet the criteria for diagnosis of major depression and/or an anxiety disorder as was true over fifty years ago. This startling increase is not the result of any new diagnostic criteria, but in fact stems from a questionnaire, known as the MMPI--the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, that has been used to assess a variety of mental disorders with over seventy seven thousand Americans since 1938. 

Some would suggest that the decline of free play may be causing this meteoric rise in anxiety & depression, while others claim it is a result of hyper-parenting and a narcissism epidemic driven by an obsessive focus on the individual.  Whatever the causes, it is a clarion call to look deeper at resilience as one of many ways towards a more hopeful future for our children and youth.

The articles contained in this edition have been selected to provide some pragmatic and meaningful suggestions for facing reality regardless of our circumstances, finding meaning in life through positive relationships and resilient networks, and discovering ways to find new solutions to the difficult challenges we inevitably face. We explore this concept of resilience in three very different developmental spaces, which are those of children, youth and adults.  Only if we can learn to bend with the winds of adversity will we learn how to flourish in times of profound change. I hope you enjoy this collection.

The Learning Team - April 2015 Edition
Resilience: Bouncing Back from Adversity

[1] Zolli, A., & Healy, A. (2012). Resilience: Why things bounce back. New York: Freepress.

[2] Twenge, J., et al., (2010). Birth cohort increases in psychopathology among young Americans, 1938-2007: A cross-temporal meta-analysis of the MMPI. In press, Clinical Psychology Review 30, 145-154.