I’m a silo buster. I have spent the past 12 years understanding what makes children, families, and communities resilient and discovered that no individual, family, social service, or community can create resilience on its own. Resilience isn’t something inside us. It is something made possible by the opportunities given to us to do well. People are better able to cope with adversity when they get what they need from others.
Let me explain. Christa is an 11-year-old girl with a severe anxiety disorder. Most days, she refuses to go to school. When she does get forcibly put on the bus, she doesn’t speak with the other children, then cowers in the bathroom rather than attend class. School phobia isn’t her only problem. She has trouble learning and doesn’t get much support at home from parents who are busy with their own complex lives. There are rumours of family violence and drug abuse.
We’ve become very adapt as mental health care providers assessing children like Christa. We can name her problems, and even offer treatment to help her manage the symptoms. The study of resilience, however, is proving to be a game changer in the field of mental health, for children and adults. We are no longer just asking what causes Christa to have problems. We are now asking what is it about children like Christa, their families, schools, and communities, that could protect children from having anxiety in the first place? And if a child does have anxiety, what are the best strategies that children use to cope? The focus isn’t so much on what went wrong but on what Christa and those around her are doing to help her avoid bigger problems, and what other children like her can do to not have these problems in the first place. The solutions are not found in any one service or government department. To experience resilience, a child’s complex problems need complex solutions.
If you meet Christa, and get her trust, she’ll tell you that she would go to school if her school was in a smaller building, with fewer children, and she had a quiet place to study. Fortunately, there are schools like that growing in popularity around the world. Their focus is on children’s strengths, building their resilience rather than just treating their disorder. It’s a subtle but incredibly important shift in focus. An alternative school right in the middle of Drayton Valley, a small prairie town that I recently visited, has created a safe place for kids like Christa. Small classrooms, individualized curriculums, and even a back door in and out of the building, help children who want to learn develop the confidence and connections they need to return to school. Solutions like this combine the resources of mental health specialists, educators, and, when possible, parents.
For more than a decade, I’ve been researching resilience around the globe. These days, I’m applying what I’ve learned to models of practice that teach human service providers how to break silos and make kids better able to cope with adversity. Uniquely, the Resilience Research Centre that I founded studies how children’s social and physical ecologies influence their resilience. Individual interventions like an anxiety treatment program or psychopharmacological medications have their place, but I doubt that simply taking away Christa’s symptoms would have made her more resilient in the future when her life becomes stressful again?
We’re a long way yet from understanding how to shape children’s experiences with their families, schools, and communities to guarantee they avoid mental health problems. The situation is even more complicated when a child’s environment is dangerous. For example, during World War II, children who were removed from their parents in England in order to keep them physically safe suffered decades of trauma, which children who stayed with their parents avoided. Likewise, these days we insist on mainstreaming children with disabilities even though many of those children say they would prefer to be educated with children with similar challenges. In both these examples, there are a complex set of issues at play. Children who were removed from their parents during the Blitz may have had their lives saved. Mainstreaming can sometimes work magic (my impression is that children with Autism benefit), though that isn’t always the case (children who are hearing impaired seem to prefer to be with their differently able-bodied peers). We adults think we are acting on our children’s behalf, but our help can make them more vulnerable rather than resilient. My research looks at this complexity and seeks to understand pathways to resilience in very challenging contexts when multiple systems have to be considered.
When Christa’s school, home, and community change to meet her needs, my guess is that she will return to school with far fewer problems. If we want to look after children like Christa and get our interventions right, we’re going to have to think not just about the child’s individual needs but also about the many different aspects of their environments that make children more resilient.
To find out more about what this kind of integrated, resilience-promoting clinical work looks like, check out my recent book for mental health professionals titled Working with Children and Youth with Complex Needs: 20 Skills to Build Resilience.
