Reaching Today's Youth: Beyond Individual Resilience

Beyond Individual Resilience

David Osher, Kimberly T. Kendziora, John VanDenBerg, and Karl Dennis

About the Editors

As senior editors of Reaching Today’s Youth, we regularly collaborate with innovators and leaders in the field to expand the depth and insights we can offer our readers. This issue is guest-edited by four such leaders. For many years, we have watched and admired the exemplary blending of research and practice achieved by David Osher, Kimberly T. Kendziora, John VanDenBerg, and Karl Dennis as they have enhanced the lives of countless families and young people while helping to shape our field. We appreciate the powerful contribution these guest editors have made through this issue of Reaching Today’s Youth, as well as their support of RTY since its inception.

Alan Meredith Blankstein
Lyndal M. Bullock

"The identification of a myriad of ‘risk factors’ has also contributed to a feeling of discouragement about children and youth. Adults have come to believe that the extensive risks in children’s lives, which are indeed a reality, doom an increasing number of children to negative outcomes—dropping out of school, using drugs, going to prison.

"The resiliency research offers a more positive and a more accurate perspective. It offers hope based on scientific evidence that many, if not most, of those who experience stress, trauma, and ‘risks’ in their lives can bounce back. It challenges educators to focus more on strengths instead of deficits. Most important, it indicates what must be in place in institutions . . . for resiliency to flourish." (Henderson & Milstein, 1996, p. 3)

"Risk has its base in epidemiology; resilience has its base in drama. The drama is that of the ‘American dream,’ the Horatio Alger legend—the mistaken view that any and all could succeed were they to work hard." (Garmezy, 1996, p. 13)

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Poverty placed Richard Hunter at risk of poor social outcomes. He left a rural environment to come to the city where he was dirty, poor, and homeless. Dressed in ragged clothes, he swore, smoked, and was careless with the little money he earned. Nonetheless, he had personal strengths that made him (to cite the titles of two classics on resilience) "invulnerable" (Anthony & Cohler, 1987) and "invincible" (Werner & Smith, 1998). Richard "was above doing anything mean or dishonorable. He would not steal, or cheat, or impose upon younger boys, but was frank and straightforward, manly and self-reliant. His nature was a noble one, and had saved him from all mean faults" (Alger, 1868, pp. 18-19).

Richard Hunter was "Ragged Dick," the hero of a novel by one of the most popular novelists of the last third of the nineteenth century, Horatio Alger. At a time when most successful business leaders came from middle- or upper-class families, when few wage earners moved up to the middle classes, when unemployment and a lack of social support placed many poor people at risk of ill health and early death, and when social Darwinists contended that the success of the rich and failure of the poor reflected a genetic survival of the fittest (Berkin, Miller, Cherny, & Gormly, 1995; Hofstadter, 1945), Alger’s novels suggested instead that poor individuals with the right genetic makeup would, with luck, escape poverty and rise to the top.

Generations of children grew up on Horatio Alger stories. The heroes pulled themselves up out of difficult conditions "by their own bootstraps" to become successful and triumphant adults. Although this story line has been our traditional model of resilience, the research literature presents a more nuanced picture of how resilience comes about and includes in its models the presence of "social buffers" from risk. For example, Emmy Werner and Ruth Smith (1998), in the summary of their longitudinal Kauai, Hawaii, study of individuals exposed to biological risk, poverty, family instability, limited parental education, and parental mental disorder, stated that "it is the balance between risk, stressful life events, and protective characteristics in the child and his caregiving environment that appears to account for the range of outcomes encountered in our study" (p. 5). Nuance aside, the popular conception of resilience retains Horatio Alger’s individualized themes: resilience is understood to be essentially dependent upon individual characteristics such as good temperament, intelligence, or the ability to form healthy relationships.

What is wrong with this individualized conceptualization of resilience? After all, there always is an individual component to resilience—whether it be genetic factors (Anthony & Cohler, 1987) or "choices" that place a person at greater risk (Rutter & Rutter, 1993). However, something is missing from this understanding—the social context that supports or discourages resilience. Children seldom live alone, so where is the family, or the community in which the child lives, or the school that he or she attends? Where are the teachers, friends, and other important people with whom that child might interact? The individualized conceptualization of resilience does not take into account how the organization of institutions in particular and society in general places some individuals at greater risk than it does others (Gore & Eckenrode, 1996; Osher, 1997).

In de-emphasizing or even discounting the importance of social context, the "Horatio Alger model" of resilience takes responsibility and power away from family, schools, community, state, and nation, and places the burden of survival squarely on the shoulders of those who are placed at risk by social as well as individual circumstances. Patrick Fagan of the conservative Heritage Foundation reflected this understanding when, after hearing a nuanced presentation on resilience, he summed up with an emphasis on individual factors: "Listening to the various speakers, I might oversimplify by saying that the research is showing that resilient children are those who are endowed by nature with cognitive abilities and/or good constitutions, plus their environment" (Consortium of Social Science Associations, 1996, p. 24). This "victim blaming" (Ryan, 1972) approach to resilience allows for the lowering of expectations and the consequent write-off of individuals or groups of individuals. Youth who are seen as not "smart enough" or "tough enough"—in other words, not resilient enough—will ultimately fall through the cracks and fail:

Blaming the victim is, of course, quite different from old-fashioned conservative ideologies. The latter simply dismissed victims as inferior, genetically defective, or morally unfit; the emphasis is on the intrinsic, even hereditary, defect. The former shifts its emphasis to environmental causation. . . . All of this happens so smoothly that it seems downright rational. First, identify a social problem. Second, study those affected by the problem and discover in what ways they are different from the rest of us as a consequence of deprivation and injustice. Third, define the differences as the cause of the social problem itself. (Ryan, 1972, pp. 7–8)

Further, by equating resilience solely with individual characteristics, we are caught up in labeling children (as "poor" or "abused," for example) rather than addressing the social factors that enable those conditions (poverty, abuse) to occur. By not acknowledging that there are social factors that keep a Ragged Dick in poverty, we turn away from strengthening families and communities. We perpetuate the very cycles of poverty, abuse, and neglect that we wish to prevent. As Suzanne Randolph (1996) commented, "When we talk about resiliency, we cannot neglect talking about adversity. We have to do a better job talking about particular adverse circumstances and try to untangle some of the large contextual variables, like poverty, and what these contexts mean for children’s development" (p. 15).

Finally, by discounting family and community and by presenting such an incomplete and narrow picture of resilience, the Horatio Alger model does little to help us learn about enabling and creating systems that foster resilience. This individualistic conceptualization of resilience teaches us that if a child is smart, determined, and lucky enough—in other words, is born with the right genetic makeup or is fortunate enough to have the right adults around—he or she just might "make it."

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Throughout this special edition of Reaching Today’s Youth, we offer alternatives to the individualized model of resilience. It is not up to the individual child alone to determine his or her success in life—the entire community must contribute to positive, resilient outcomes. It may be true that some people are challenged by genetic predispositions to behave aggressively or by biologically driven temperaments that incline one toward irritability or anxiety. These risk factors are real, but they are not excuses to throw up our hands and dismiss a child as a lost cause. There are interventions that work, even to reduce the impact of biological risk factors. There are sources of help and promise for children growing up under a cloud of accumulated risks. And there are programs that work to foster resilience.

The purpose of this issue is to examine and emphasize these various social components of resilience—how we create environments that support resilience. The traditional model of resilience, which stresses individual responsibility for successful outcomes, is not entirely wrong. Individuals do have some responsibility for their own success in life. What we want to stress here is that individuals are not alone. Families and communities can make a real difference in children’s lives, and we all need to come together to support those family members and communities and enhance their capacity to care (see Quinn, Osher, Hoffman, & Hanley, 1998, p. 27). Maintaining this broader social focus on resilience targets our interventions in three ways: (1) risk prevention or reduction; (2) asset enhancement; and (3) facilitating protective mechanisms in youth (e.g., avoiding risk behavior) and in the family, school, and the community (Hawkins et al., 1992; Masten & Coatsworth, 1998).

This facilitation of protective factors is not only important for children and youth who are at risk of poor social outcomes. It is also important for the adults who live with, work with, or otherwise support children and youth. The successful interventions and programs described in this issue all provide what Vygotsky (1978) called a scaffold that enables adults—parents, educators, mental health workers, youth workers, and others—to establish and sustain warm, caring, supporting (Turner, 1997), hopeful (Byrne et al., 1994), and positive relationships with children and youth who have challenging behaviors.

Like Ragged Dick, many children and youth experience multiple stressors and are placed at risk of poor social outcomes (Cowen, Hightower, Pedro-Carroll, Work, & Wyman, 1996). A focus on resilience can help improve outcomes for these children and youth. It can move us beyond an exclusive focus on pathology (Norman, 1997), provide insight into the variability of individual outcomes, and remind us, in the words of Emmy Werner (1998), that "not all development is determined by what happens early in life" (p. 2). As helpful as the concept of resilience can be, we must always be on guard against a resurgence of the individualized model:

The great danger I see in the idea of resilience is in expecting children to overcome deprivation and anger on their own. Therefore, I want to close with the same message I opened with. There is no magic here; resilient children have been protected by actions of adults, by good nurturing, by their assets, and by opportunities to succeed. We cannot stand by as the infrastructure for child development collapses in this nation, expecting miracles. (Masten, 1996, p. 24)

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David Osher is an editorial board member of Reaching Today’s Youth and a senior fellow at American Institutes for Research, where he directs the Center for Effective Collaboration and Practice. His recent publications (which he co-authored with Center colleagues) include Safe, Drug-Free and Effective Schools for All Students: What works!; Early Warning, timely Response: A Guide to Safe Schools; and The Role of Education in a system of Care: Effectively Serving Children with Emotional or Behavioral Disorders. He can be reached at the Center for Effective Collaboration and Practice, 1000 Thomas Jefferson N.W., Suite 400, Washington, DC 20007, telephone (888) 457-1551 or (202) 944-5400, fax (202) 944-5408, email center@air-dc.org.

Kimberly Kendziora is a research analyst at the American Institutes for Research, where she works for the Center for Effective Collaboration and Practice. She focuses her work on issues of prevention of mental health problems in children. She can be reached at the American Institutes for Research, Pelavin Research Center, 1000 Thomas Jefferson Street, N.W., Suite 400, Washington, DC 20007, telephone (202) 944-5391, fax (202) 944-5454, e-mail kkendziora@dc.air.org.

Karl Dennis has been the executive director of Kaleidoscope Inc. in Chicago for the past 21 years. He is considered one of the country’s top experts on community-based care and a pioneer of wraparound services, as well as one of the national founders of intensive in home family services and therapeutic foster care. He has helped orchestrate state initiatives to return children from out-of-state placements and has provided services to thousands of children and their families since 1973. He can be reached at Kaleidoscope Inc., 1279 North Milwaukee, Suite 250, Chicago, IL 60622, telephone (773) 278-7200 x297, fax (773) 278-0251.

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REFERENCES

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