The Truth About Resilience: It's Not What You Think

Hello NABU Team and Friends,

If you are reading this newsletter, you are winning at life. What did you face on your journey to becoming literate and educated? Take a moment to reflect on your own childhood—do you now feel grateful for the obstacles that helped shape you, or do you wonder if you would have thrived more without certain challenges?

Our understanding of resilience is crucial because it directly impacts our practice. While resilience is often celebrated as a virtue in society, research presents it as a more complex and sometimes controversial concept. By exploring these nuances, you can develop a well-informed perspective and design interventions that effectively support resilience, grounded in scientific evidence.

What is Resilience?

Early research on resilience focused largely on the personal traits of 'resilient children'—those who appeared to thrive despite adversity. This perspective implied that some children simply 'lacked what it takes' to succeed. However, the field has since evolved to embrace a broader understanding, focusing on environmental influences and, more recently, protective processes that support resilience. Importantly, attention to cultural influences, long overdue in resilience research, is finally gaining traction.

Today, resilience is defined as a dynamic process involving positive adaptation in the face of significant adversity (Masten, 2014; Luthar, 2000). Two critical components shape this concept:

• Adversity: Includes significant threats like trauma, neglect, or severe hardships. In the global context, children are facing adversities such as poverty, natural disasters, conflict, and displacement.

• Positive Adaptation: refers to the factors present in the environment that protect or buffer children from adversity. Examples include positive relationships with a caring teacher, or a community program that provides children with a safe and nurturing space to play.

A simple formula to understand resilience is:

My Insights: The Complexity of Resilience

1. Resilience is not a trait: It's crucial to avoid portraying resilience as a personal characteristic.

2. Cultural context matters: Different cultures have unique protective factors. For example, some East African cultures have a strong concept of community expressed in the concept of “Ubuntu” which research demonstrates plays a crucial role in resilience among youth.

3. Timing may be important: There may be sensitive periods in a child's development when resilience-building interventions are particularly effective.

In my view, resilience is not just about survival; its about factors and programs that help children to achieve developmental milestones and thrive despite adversity. What matters most are the protective factors—support systems, meaningful relationships, and nurturing experiences—that help guide positive adaptation during difficult times. While we can't entirely prevent negative experiences, our goal is to stack positive experiences to ensure the balance tips in favor of positive outcomes.

Key Takeaways for NABU and Beyond

As we develop the Read For Resilience collection of stories for refugee children, below are some takeaways:

1.     Language matters: Resilience should be framed as a holistic, dynamic concept that spans multiple domains of a child’s life. Avoid using terms like “resilient” as a static adjective to describe individual traits, or “resiliency” as something fixed.

2.     Craft narratives that emphasize protective factors: Consider how our stories in the collection highlight the supportive relationships and community strengths that helped children thrive, rather than focusing solely on individual struggles. In particular, how can we highlight the assets that are already present within local families, communities and culture through the stories we tell?

If you want to go deeper on this important work, check out this amazing resource from the Harvard Center for The Developing Child.

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Join Us on This Journey

This exploration of topics in early childhood goes beyond the NABU team; it's for anyone with a deep interest in development, education, technology, and media. Whether you're a donor, educator, partner, or practitioner, there’s valuable insight here for you. Together, we can collaborate, learn, and make a lasting impact.

Thank you for being an integral part of this journey. I’m excited to continue this exploration with you.

Tanyella Allison Leta