Resilience in “Precious”
Precious (Daniels, 2010) is a 16 year-old Black girl living in Harlem. She is overweight and pregnant with her second child. She is emotionally and physically abused by her mother, and she has been raped several times by her father, who is also the father of both of Precious’ children. Precious is also only able to read at below the 8th grade level. She continues to live with her abusive mother, and both are very poor.
When Precious’ current public school finds out that she is pregnant, they remove her, suggesting she attend an alternative school. Precious’ mother would rather her daughter attend a public alternative program so her mother could continue to receive welfare, but a counselor who visits their home convinces Precious to attend a different program that would get Precious ready to graduate high school or obtain a GED.
In spite of her fury over being kicked out of her public school and her innate understanding that she needed to get a good education, Precious has very poor self-esteem. She calls herself names and does not believe she will ever amount to anything.
Risk/Resilience Approach
The idea behind risk and resilience in terms of development is that without risk, or obstacles, a child will not develop the ability to overcome future risks on their own (Laser & Nicotera, 2011). Resilience is a person’s ability to overcome adversity, so when a child is over-protected, he/she/they develops less resilience because there is limited exposure to risk. On the other hand, a child exposed to a high amount of trauma and risk will generally have a harder time developing resilience. What is evident no matter what is that everything is relative to individual experience, and both the individual and external protective factors influencing the child will have the greatest impact on how resilient a child becomes (Davies, 2011).
Keeping in mind that the individual child lives within myriad systems, the assumption that any child can develop strong resilience is not out of the question for anyone. In particular with children growing up in highly risky environments and facing such obstacles as crime, poverty, abuse, war, or other traumas, taking account of the various protective factors available to them is paramount to their ability to achieve a high level of resilience. Additionally, children with internal vulnerabilities that they cannot change, such as a disability, can still develop strong resiliency if their other external protective factors are present (Davies, 2011).
Protective Factors
For Precious, her only real internal/inherent protective factor is her kindness. Her temperament is what generally keeps her mother at bay much of the time. She takes care of what she can around the house and tries to be “good.” When she enters the new school, her temperament enables her to make friends and to trust her teacher, who does have Precious’ best interest at heart. Unfortunately, her kindness also makes her vulnerable to hoping that if she can just take care of things, her mother would see her differently: that she might be loved. Her temperament has contributed to her feelings of worthlessness because she is submissive to the whims of her parents. She believes she deserves it.
Risk and Protective Factors
Microsystems
Precious has very few protective factors in her microsystems. Although her public school does have her best interest at heart, when her pregnancy is discovered, that safety net is removed by the school itself, preferring to not have such a girl among the other students. Otherwise, her community is high-risk. Harlem at this time is dangerous. There is a lot of crime, including murders and rapes. Drugs are bought and sold on the streets. There is a communal sense of desperation in her neighborhood, though. If one were to dig, one might find the shared experience — and therefore empathy — with her neighbors might give Precious a sense of belonging, but the level of daily trauma inflicted on all who live there pales in comparison.
Precious’ family life provides no protection. It is all risk. Although her grandmother takes care of Precious’ first child, her grandmother has no room for Precious in her life. What is worse is the physical and mental abuse exacted on her by her mother, and that her rapist father is still a part of Precious’ life. Neither parent provides any protection factors. Precious has no sense of safety, belonging, or encouragement from them.
Mesosystem
The only protective factors present here could be found in the relationship between Precious’ neighborhood and the public school which Precious attended before she became pregnant. This is a community school where everyone knows each other. In spite of her size, Precious has a sense of belonging there and of being understood by her peers and teachers because they experience what she does. It isn’t until Precious goes to the new alternative school that the relationship between peers and the school itself become apparent. In her previous school, it was a part of the risk as much as of the protective factor. The new school, however, was aimed specifically at girls just like her to give them a fighting chance at making something more of themselves and thereby improving resilience. Whereas previously Precious’ sense of resilience had been based on a predictability of her environment, the new school enabled her to see how she could self-regulate and consider new ways of being herself. The other girls in similar situations also came from different places. This enabled Precious to learn that she wasn’t living in a unique situation. She wasn’t alone.
Exosystem
For Precious, her main caregiver was her mother. Mary, her mother, was nothing but risk to Precious. Not only was she abusive, but she also relied on Precious’ very existence to provide basic necessities for herself by virtue of the welfare assistance she received. Even after giving birth to her second child, Precious felt she had to continue living with her mother to enable Mary to maintain her welfare payments so that Precious’ new baby could hopefully have a better life elsewhere.
It was the same case with her father. He was nothing but risk for Precious. He raped her multiple times and continued to be allowed in her life (by her mother). Her father was employed at times but often lived off of others. He, like her mother, had nothing but contempt for Precious’ existence.
Precious’ first school did offer dome protection for her. It was a place she knew and understood. Expectations were not high, but she was expected to be there. Yet, when she needed that system the most, it turned her out. The school could no longer be depended on for any sense of acceptance or safety. The alternative school, however, provided her a sense of agency and belonging. The teachers were encouraging, enabling her to locate internal resources and to see herself in a different way. There was no risk being at the new school because it provided clearly defined rules and structure that made Precious comfortable to explore within.
Macrosystem
In Precious’ macrosystem, she was exposed to the most risk. She was poor, black, a female, and overweight. Society looks down on all four of these factors, and her environment was made up of them. Being poor and black are damning in themselves in the eyes of many. These two things were inescapable at the time this story was told. They not only brought down Precious as an individual, it also brought down her neighborhood, her school, and even her family. The added perceived deficits of being female and obese contributed to the risk experienced by Precious. Society at large looked down on her entire being.
Individual and Contextual Risk/Protective Factors
For Precious, her relationship with her English teacher, Blu Rain, was a protective factor. Precious’ attachment to Blu in particular led to an increased sense of self-worth and resilience. The girls in her alternative school also attributed to Precious’ positive changes. They all bonded over a shared traumatic background and also over a shared hopefulness inspired by the school.
Negative Outcomes
In spite of Precious’ new outlook on her future, she still has two children from rapes by her father, and she still has an abusive mother. She also contracted HIV from her father, which makes her future somewhat uncertain. She can change the course of her future with newly found self-esteem and self-reliance, but even if she leaves Harlem, she still has her family to either contend with or abandon. Either decision will continue to have a negative impact on her life until or unless she seeks help in coping with it.
Risk/Resilience Framework Perspective
Just as our personal experiences color our view of the world around us, so does our view of how successful we think a person can be in overcoming obstacles and develop resilience. If we as therapists believe that anyone can turn an area of risk into a place of growth, we stand a better chance of helping our clients find their way toward better lives re-created from their own self-determination.
Laser & Nicotera (2011) briefly discuss the PROSPER model (PROmoting School-community-university Partnerships to Enhance Resilience to bring social, emotional, and mental health services to school aged children and their families. This model gives students and their parents the tools to be more and provide better environments for resilient youth. I am the coordinator for a federal grant (Project AWARE) that promotes the same agenda. My state is rural and has a high rate of poverty and drug use. But the state is actively combating these risk factors by enlisting students, families, schools, communities, and our contracted partners to develop action plans specific to each school so that we can, hopefully, raise more resilient people who will also teach resilience to their own children.
References
Daniels, L. (2010). Precious [Drama]. Lionsgate.
Davies, D. (2011). Child Development: A Practitioner’s Guide (Third). Retrieved from https://ncuone.ncu.edu/d2l/le/content/94257/viewContent/825048/View
Laser, J. A., & Nicotera, N. (2011). Working with adolescents: A guide for practitioners (ePub). Retrieved from https://ncuone.ncu.edu/d2l/le/content/94257/viewContent/825052/View
