“The Science of Resilience”

““Resilience depends on supportive, responsive relationships and mastering a set of capabilities that can help us respond and adapt to adversity in healthy ways,” says Shonkoff, director of the Center on the Developing Child at Harvard. “It’s those capacities and relationships that can turntoxic stress into tolerable stress.”

As a growing body of research is showing, the developing brain relies upon the consistent “serve and return” interactions that happen between a young child and a primary caregiver, the report says. When these interactions occur regularly, they provide the scaffolding that helps build “key capacities — such as the ability to plan, monitor, and regulate be­havior, and adapt to changing circumstances — that enable children to respond to adversity and to thrive,” the report continues. The developing brain is buffered by this feedback loop between biology and environment…

The experiences of the subset of children who overcome adversity and end up with unexpectedly positive life outcomes are helping to fuel a new understanding of the nature of resilience — and what can be done to build it.”

I have complex feeling about “resilience” depending on how it is defined. It feels like it is asking individuals to overcome systemic problems, instead of asking the systems to change. It then blames the people who don’t overcome, for failing to be resilient, and it ignores the sacrifices people probably had to make in order to be resilient.

I like resilience on a community scale, I like resilience as an outcome; I guess I don’t like it as an “innate trait”.