This document discusses the concept of resilience and risks to resilience. It defines resilience as the ability to recover from difficulties and adapt well in challenging circumstances. Resilience is influenced both by internal factors like personality as well as external environmental supports. The document outlines several categories of risk factors that can threaten resilience at the personal, relationship, community, and cultural levels. These include things like poverty, family dysfunction, discrimination, violence, and lack of resources. It emphasizes that risks often interact cumulatively rather than in isolation to influence outcomes. The conclusion provides lessons about overcoming challenges and persevering despite difficulties.

1. WHAT IS RESILIENCE?
DR. M.J. MALINDI

2. • Resilience was thought to be a
characteristic of children who were
thought to be:
• Invincible;
• Invulnerable;
• Unshakable;
• Unbeatable;
• Indomitable;
• Impenetrable;
• Unconquerable;
• Indestructible;

3. We all know… the person whose father was an
alcoholic and whose mother was frequently
hospitalised with a psychiatric disorder, yet who
is now a happy and dedicated family man;
(What made this possible?)

4. We all know the person who rose from the most
severe deprivation and poverty to become a
competent, caring medical doctor;
(What made this possible?)

5. We all know the child who was orphaned at a
young age, grew up in children’s homes,
became a juvenile delinquent and then settled
into stable employment and is now a
respected
member of his community;
(What made this possible?)

6. We all know the person who experienced major
discrimination in his youth, was unfairly
imprisoned for many years and then went on to
become an icon of compassion, forgiveness
and dignity;
(What made this possible?)

7. Of course, we also know people whose lives
have seemed to follow a very different pattern:
individuals who seem to have had every
advantage that life could offer a loving family,
supportive friends, a good education, enough
money and so forth-yet seem unable to become
well-adjusted and productive adults”
(Killian, 2004)
(How do you explain this?

8. PHYSICS
• The ability of a substance to return to its
original shape after it has been pressed or
bent

9. BIOLOGY
• The ability to recover quickly from illness,
change, or misfortune; buoyancy.
• The property of a material that enables it
to resume its original shape or position
after being bent, stretched, or
compressed; elasticity

10. ECONOMICS
• Refers to the inherent and adaptive
responses to hazards that enable
individuals and communities to avoid
some potential losses.
• It can take place at the level of the firm,
household, market, or macroeconomy.

11. • Resilience is a context-specific term that is
not easy to define;
• The ecological perspective (Masten, 2001)
sees resilience as:
• positive outcomes despite the experience of
adversity/difficulties (being an orphan);
• continued positive or effective functioning in
adverse circumstances (sustained poverty),
• recovery after significant trauma
IN PSYCHOLOGY

12. The social ecology of resilience perspective
(Ungar, 2006; Ungar, 2007; Ungar 2008)
conceptualises resilience as:
•the capacity of individuals to navigate their way
to the resources that sustain well-being;
•the capacity of the individual’s physical and
social ecologies to provide resilience resources;
and lastly,
•the capacity of individuals, families and
communities to negotiate culturally meaningful
ways to share resources.

13. • Resilience is about someone doing well in
contexts where the circumstances
confronting this person would typically
predict poor developmental outcomes or
psychopathology (drug abuse, depression,
suicide, etc.)

14. • Resilience is a dynamic process, rather than
a fixed attribute or characteristic one has as
previously thought;
• Resilience in children depends on
what is built inside them AND on what is
built around them;
• Individuals are not considered resilient if they
have never been exposed to significant risk or
threat that threatened to derail their
development;

15. • Only when such threat or risk is present, and
overcome, does the notion of resilience come
into play.

17. HIDDEN RESILIENCE AND HABITUATION
• For some, life is a long, drawn out, constant,
daily struggle for survival;
• Coping is then based on unconventional
mechanisms;
• Long suffering brings about habituation
• This so for the following groups of children:

18. STREET CHILDREN

19. HOW THEY COPE
• Begging;
• Glue sniffing;
• Petty crime;
• Vandalising payphones;
• Rag-picking;
• Prostitution;

20. YOUTH AND CIVIL WAR

21. POVERTY

22. ABANDONED CHILDREN

23. NEGLECTED CHILDREN

24. PROSTITUTION

25. WHAT ARE THE LESSONS LEARNED

30. THERE ARE ONLY TWO RULES IN LIFE
RULE NUMBER 1:

31. RULE NUMBER 2
ALWAYS REMEMBER RULE
NUMBER 1

32. STAY BLESSED

33. Study Unit 2: Risks to resilience

34. On the street I saw a small girl,
Cold and shivering in a thin dress,
With little hope of a decent meal.
I became angry and said to God:
Why did you permit this? Why don’t
you do something about it?
For a while God said nothing. That night
He replied quite suddenly:
“I certainly did something about it,
I made you.”
(Anonymous: submitted by Mary Rose McGeady-Covenant House)
Picture from: Children First (2005)

35. WHAT ARE RISK PROCESSES
• Generally, the term, risk refers to individual/personal
and environmental factors or processes that
combine to increase the individual’s
likelihood of negative developmental
outcomes in children;
• Risk refers to the variables that interact/work
together to bring about poor adjustment or
psychopathology;
• Risk processes do not directly cause adjustment
problems, but typically encourage poor adjustment in
the presence of other risks.

36. • Risks can have a cumulative effect
• Risk originates from multiple stressors rather
than from single individual or environmental
processes;
• Personal and/or environmental risks may
have a cumulative effect on an individual and
this cumulative effect is associated with non-
resilient outcomes;
• Risks should be understood as chains of
events, or processes, rather than singular
events or negative episodes;

37. • Some risks can be related to the biological
make-up of a child. For example, sensory-
motor deficits which affect the ability to learn
and explore the environment and unusual
sensitivities, low birth weight, age and poor
memory are implicated in the development of
poor adjustment;
• Risk processes are context-specific rather than
universal;
• Risks can be personal/individual, in
relationships, in the community and part of a
culture

38. PERSONAL/INDIVIDUAL LEVEL
• Difficult personality;
• Biological make-up (disability);
• Low birth-weight;
• Poor memory;
• Low intelligence;
• Low self esteem;
• Poor self image;
• Lack of assertiveness;
• Poor sense of humour;
• Low frustration tolerance
• Feeling neglected;
• Feeling unloved/unwanted

39. RELATIONSHIPS
• inability to maintain healthy
relationships;
• familial psychiatric
problems,
• chronic and profound social
stressors,
• low socio-economic status,
• low academic
achievements by parents,
• teenage pregnancy;
• domestic violence;
• parental illness;
• parentified youth;
• poor family functioning or
discord,
• parental harshness,
• child abuse;
• unemployment;
• parental alcoholism;
• divorce;
• parental death;
• lack of positive role models;

41. COMMUNITY
• armed conflict,
• forced migration,
• environmental degradation
and exploitation;
• lack of resources, e.g.
libraries, health-care,
social, security, housing,
electricity, water, road
infrastructure, etc,
• violence;
• bullying;
• mocking by peers;
• crime;
• gang activity;
• availability of weapons;
• availability of drugs;
• discrimination;
• overcrowding;
• noise levels;
• HIV/AIDS;
• single parent homes;

43. CULTURAL
Cultural contexts include:
•ethnicity,
•race and racism,
• discrimination
• gender,
• socioeconomic status,
• sexual orientation,
• religion;
•cultural groundedness
•practices and procedures in handling risk
•lack of cohesion

44. • Cults;
• Harmful rights of passage;

46. LESSONS LEARNED
• You cannot prevent the birds of sadness from
passing over your head, but you can prevent
their making a nest in your hair. Chinese
proverb
• Speak when you are angry, and you will make
the best speech that you will ever regret. Dr.
Laurence J. Peter
• Failure is not falling down, but refusing to get
up. Chinese proverb