Post written by Bonnie Benard
To build the resilience of students who face adversity, we need to nurture the whole spectrum of their developmental needs.
Forty years of resilience research following children who face multiple challenges into adulthood has yielded a surprising but consistent finding: Most children and youth—even those coming from highly stressed or abusive families or from resource-deprived communities—do somehow manage to overcome their often overwhelming odds and become "competent, confident, and caring" adults (Werner & Smith, 2001).
How do these children "make it?" The answer is simpler than we may think. The research has identified certain strengths that enable youth to succeed and offers guidance on how families, schools, and communities can nurture these assets. This research has lent support to many strengths-based movements—for example, asset building, health promotion, positive psychology, and social and emotional intelligence and literacy—that are gaining in popularity among researchers and practitioners alike. What unites all these movements is the commonsense tenet that we can learn much more from examining what nurtures and protects children on their life journeys than from dwelling on their risk factors.
A simple way to think of resilience is as an inborn wisdom driving social, emotional, cognitive, and moral/spiritual development.1 In my review of the resilience research (Benard, 1991), I connected each of
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