Building Resilience

in Young People
Readings
• Gillian Schofield & Mary Beek,(2014) The Secure Base
Model: Promoting Attachment and Resilience in Foster
Care and Adoption.
• Gilligan,R.(2012) Promoting a Sense of 'Secure Base' for
Children in Foster Care - Exploring the Potential
Contribution of Foster Fathers , Journal of Social Work
Practice, 26 , (4), 2012, p473 – 486.
• Gilligan , R.(2017) Resilience Theory and Social Work
Practice' Chapter 29 in, editor(s)Francis J. Turner , Social
Work Treatment: Interlocking Theoretical Perspectives,
6th Edition , New York, Oxford University Press, 2017,
pp441 - 451,
• Ungar,M. (2004). Nurturing Hidden Resilience in Troubled
Youth . University of Toronto Press. Chpt.1&7
• Ungar, M. (2004) The importance of Parents and Other
Caregivers to the Resilience of High- risk Adolescents.
Family Process Vol. 43. No. 1
• Gilligan, R. (2001). Promoting Resilience : A resource
guide on working with children in the care system . BAAF
• Nicola Atwool (2006): Attachment and Resilience:
Implications for Children in Care. Child Care in Practice,
12:4, 315-330
Lecture outline
• Defining resilience
• The concept of resilience
• Key “social ingredients” of resilience
• Ungar’s work : The use of Narrative therapy
ideas to build stories of resilience
• Working therapeutically with young people at
risk
What is resilience?
• The concept of resilience provides a necessary
framework for understanding the varied ways in which
some children do well in the face of adversity.
• “class of phenomena characterised by good outcomes in
spite of serious threats to adaptation or development”
(Maten (2001: 228) as a cited in Ungar, 2004, 5).
• “relative resistance to psychosocial risk experiences”
(Rutter,1999).
What is resilience?
• “ Resilience is usually defined as the ability to function
competently despite living or having lived in adversity and it
includes a range of protective characteristics, such as self-
esteem, self-efficacy, a sense of security, hopefulness and
reflective function, which contribute to successful adaptation
and coping” (Rutter, 1985; Fonagy et al., 1994; Sroufe, 1997;
Rutter, 1999).
3 Dimensions of Resilience

• 1. Over coming the odds- being successful despite exposure to

high risk
• 2. Sustaining competence under pressure- adapting to high
pressure
• 3. Recovering from trauma- adjusting successfully to negative
life events
Factors that influence why
youngsters be resilient in face of
adversity
Interaction of
• Qualities of risk and adversity involved
• Qualities and experiences of the young person
• Qualities of the relationship and environment in which the
young person is growing up
Nb of social support
• While individual attributes may be nb , it should be
remembered that resilience emerges in a supportive context
(Gilligan ,2001)
The concept of resilience
• People’s development progresses along a pathway
• What happens next is influenced but not determined by
what goes before
• Adverse experiences of sufficient severity may block the
natural drive for development and healing.
• Resilience, serves to release the natural flow of recovery
and development that might otherwise be paralysed or
frozen by negative experiences
The concept of resilience
• Resilient children have access to supportive and
protective resources in their lives that help buffer them
against the effects of adverse environments and
circumstances
• It is the social context in which the person lives their live
that fosters or inhibits resilience that they may or may
not possess.
• Services can enhance resilience in young people by
positively influencing social experiences and social
resources available to them
• Even where it is not possible to reduce negative factors,
adding one or more positive factors may lead to more
favourable balance in the child’s life.
“ Tilting the balance”

Negative
Factors

Positive
Factors
Some Propositions of resilient
approach( Gilligan, 2001)
• Change comes through supportive relationships
• Change comes through new ways of thinking about
problems and possibilities
• Change can sometimes come from little things
• Change can grow from the ordinary and the everyday, it
does not have to come from the specialist or clinical
sources.
• Change may come from a single opportunity or positive
turning point which leads to other good things.
• Getting even some things right is a good place to start
Key “social ingredients” of
resilience (Gilligan , 2001)
• Social roles
• Secure base
• Identity
• Self esteem
• Self – efficacy
1. Social Roles
• Social roles : Research evidence suggests that it is protective
of mental health to have such a set of multiple role identities
• Too restricted a set of role identities may put the person at
risk psychologically.
• May unhelpful for a person to be virtually trapped in one
major role identity
• One story is not the whole story about a person
1. Social Roles
• The different arenas in which yp might be live their lives
(home, extended family, neighbourhood, school, work, clubs
provide a range of opportunities for extending our role set
• These multiples role identities can play an nb part in
protecting the young person mental health.
2. Secure Base
• Relates to the physical and emotional ties that support and
sustain us in our growth and development
• Which console us in times of distress
• Stability and continuity
2. Secure base

Stability
Continuity
2. Secure Base
• Young people in care may be more likely to be able to
withstand the “ gusts of adversity” in their life if their roots go
deep.
2. Secure base
• Stability: e.g. children in care remaining in the
same placement
• Gets a chance to put down some roots.
• The deeper the roots go down the better
chances of the yp ,may be resilient in the face of
adversity
• Continuity refers to the absence of severe
disruption to a child’s network of relationships,
their personal and cultural identity , and their
education and health care ( Jackson and Thomas,
1999:19 cited in Gilligan , 2001)
Possible outcomes for young people
in care
Stability
High

Child remains in same

placement and has no contact Child remains in same placement
with family/ last network over time & has contact with family
last network
Continuity High
Low
Child has many moves
Child had many & maintains links with family/
placements & no contact last network
with family.

Low
Stability

• “I just think if they’ve had more placement moves it’s harder

for them to settle in one place for any length of time”.
(Aftercare worker)
• Not solely related to stability of placement setting but also
more significantly the importance of positive and stable
relationships with professionals involved in their care
• Key working relationships particularly nb
(Dumaret et al., 2011; Martin & Jackson, 2002; McLeod, 2010 cited in Holt & Kirwan,
2012).
Resilience: Secure Base
• Importance of relationship building as a medium for building
resilience in young people.
• Resilience in young people in residential care was enhanced
by workers ‘‘being there’’ for them, and where caring,
nurturing relationships are developed by residential staff living
through the ‘‘highs and lows’’ of the young people’s lives.
(Houston 2010, p. 367 cited in Holt& Kirwan, 2012)
• Continuity is an essential characteristic of relationships for
young people if they are to feel fully supported
Resilience: Secure Base
• Cashmore and Paxman (2006) discuss the need of the young
person in care for ‘‘felt security’’
• Strongly link with positive outcomes for those young people
when it is present.
• Security of relationships was a fundamental plank in helping
the young people in mediating the experience of separation
from their family of origin.
• Stability of placement was central to the notion of ‘‘felt
security’’, but, just staying in the same placement was only
one aspect of ‘‘felt security’’.
• Continuity also featured as an important factor alongside
supportive relationships with those around them
3. Identity
• Identity- knowing their story
• Telling their story perhaps by writing it down helps to
reinforce their identity
• Self narrative
4. Self- esteem

• Positive self- esteem is valuable buffer against the

adverse effects of negative experience.
• YP with good self- esteem will be less vulnerable in the
face of negative events or process in their lives
• Good self-esteem derives from a sense of being
accepted by people whose relationship one values &
from a sense of accomplishment in tasks one values
( Rutter, 1990 cited in Gilligan, 2001)
5. Self – efficacy
• It is about qualities of optimism , persistence and believing
that one’s own efforts make a difference.
• Sense of self- efficacy is enhanced by opportunities to practice
the art of taking responsibility and taking and contributing to
decisions which affect the one’s life
Social construction of
resilience
• The youth that Ungar (2004) focuses upon are typically
experiencing professionals, family constructing their
identities in problem saturation.
• Deviant behaviours are argued by the youth to give
them ‘…a sense of meaning, purpose, opportunities for
participation in social action, sense of belonging and
attachment, …personal and social power, social support
(Ungar, 2004: 6).
Identity
• Need to challenge the dominant discourse that
pathologizes the identities that high risk youths
construct
• It has been assumed that the delinquent is some how
dysfunctional
• Some youths may choose forms of conduct disordered
behaviour as a way of bolstering a fledging identity story.
(Ungar, 2004)
Identity
• Scott Okamoto (1999 cited in Ungar, 2004) looked at
interagency collaboration with high – risk gang youth
• Found that the language that professionals use to
describe troubled kids creates a spiralling cycle of more
and more restrictive interventions & placements that
further exasperate children’s individual efforts to sustain
health
Identity
• Children’s health status and identity are constructed
through the records kept about them
• May make a youth whose disruptive or violent behaviour
is only episodic, contextual appear too dangerous for
informal placements.
• Records do not reflect alternate stories that teenagers
tell about themselves which explain their actions
differently
The “self narrative” & building of
resilience
• Our identities are constructed inside the social
narratives that we co-author with others.
• Some narratives that are constructed socially
give power to one group at the expense of
another
• By attending closely to the teens constructions
of their personal narratives, workers are in the
position to collaborate in the deconstruction of
the meaning that certain deviant acts have for
the youth who perpetrate them
The “self narrative” & building of
resilience
• Series of conversations through which new
meanings for everyday events are co- created
and then put forward as explanations for what
people experience
• Generates new meanings for everyday events
and in the process, challenges the dominant
discourse through the construction of an
alternate one.
• Nurturing and maintaining health – enhancing ,
self narratives
Working therapeutically with
young people
• Ironically , the stories youths tell about themselves are more
often about survival stories full of health, coping and
adaptation but they are not stories privileged with the same
power as the stories of illness, neglect, and failure that others
construct for them ( Ungar, 2004: 204)
Working therapeutically with
young people
• Common element in all successful interventions is nurturing a
new self story that is powerful enough to replace an old one.
• Good therapeutic work finds & builds upon narratives of
resilience , helping children avoid unnecessary drift into
problem- saturated discourses