Today I'm going to talk about enduring controversies in research on resilience and children. As in any field of science, over the years, controversies develop. I think that's a sign of science that's maturing. And I want to share some of the most enduring controversies in this field of research with you. One, is this fundamental question: is resilience a trait? This has come up over, over the whole five decades of science and resilience. And I would answer this question emphatically no. But it does keep coming up. I think there are individual differences in the personality and assets that people have that do matter, but there's not single trait of resilience. There's just no such thing. And resilience involves so many interactions of different systems, both within the child and in the environment. And people encounter different situations, so it's not surprising that there would not be a single trait for resilience. And of course some of the most powerful adaptive systems we've seen that give people their capacity for positive adaptation aren't even in the person at all. They're in relationships or in the family or in the community. I also think that this notion can end up blaming the victim. The victim of adversity in the sense that people say well, what's the matter with this person? How come they're not showing resilience? As if, they don't have the right stuff in some sense. So I think this is not a good idea, and I would argue that resilience never has been a trade and really isn't a single trade, and I think it's time we move on from this controversy. Another enduring controversy has asked this question: is resilience more than a positive framing of risk and vulnerability? In other words, is this just a new word for something we've already been paying attention to? Or is there something important and value added about the concept of resilience. And I would answer this question: is there value added? Yes, because I think it really has made a difference in the focus of both science and intervention to bring attention to adaptive processes, to positive outcomes. And I think also that the, a resilience approach has emphasized the positive goals and strategies in ways that have a great deal of appeal, and motivate many stakeholders including young people themselves. Another enduring controversy has been the question of whether there is a price for resilience. Is there some kind of price to pay for resilience? And this actually have several different meanings, and my answer to this would vary depending on what it means. One way you could think about this, is that terrible experience can leave scars. And that certainly appears to be the case. Both physical scars and psychological scars from enduring adversity. And we saw the girl in the picture. She, has, you know, who experienced the burns from Napalm. She has physical scars of this experience, and I imagine it had profound effects on her psychologically as well. She's a resilient person and I, but I would describe the, the impact in terms of the price, that would be the price of the adversity. I wouldn't think about that as the price of the resilience. Another way people look at this, is to think about trade-offs. Sometimes to survive in the short run, you have to change in ways that may not be adaptive in the long run. So, the strategies you use to survive at one point in development or in one domain of your life, may not work very well later on or in a different domain. And I think a good example of that is when you have children who live in a very violent or dangerous home or community, and they learn survival skills that are self protective in that environment. But those very same skills may not work when they go to a safe learning environment like a skill. And they may have to learn new, different strategies for succeeding in school compared to surviving on the street. And sometimes children have to do these things both at the same time. The third meaning of a price for resilience truly is a price that one could pay, in the sense that positive achievements could exact a cost in terms of the effort or strain required, and the energy required to be successful in a very adverse situation. For example, to be successful when you face a lot of discrimination. To be successful when you struggle everyday to overcome the barriers of poverty in order to succeed in school. And there has been some evidence in the literature over the years that there is this kind of, maybe this kind of price. I think we still are doing research on this question. But in the study on the Children of Kauai by Emmy Werner and her colleagues, there was some indication that some of the most resilient young people who grew up on the island of Kauai and overcame childhood adversity, developed some health problems in adulthood that may have been related to the stress they endured in earlier on in childhood. Another interesting enduring controversy concerns the question of definition. Who should define positive adaptation when you think about resilience? And we've talked about this before. Sometimes researchers decide the criteria when you did interviews, you thought about the criteria. And sometimes, people make different decisions. They, and scientists or in case studies, people, you know, use different criteria to define resilience. So, for example, some people think it's important to consider happiness, how you're doing on the inside, when you think about resilience. Other investigators pay less attention to how happy you are and more attention to whether you're succeeding in the developmental tasks that you're supposed to be doing at a given age, like doing well in school or doing well at work or taking care of your family. That sort of thing. And sometimes it's the case that there's a difference of opinion between a family and a school district in what children should be doing. So a, a school may use a criterion for what is successful. And the families of some of the children may disagree with that. Some families may not think it's important to succeed in the ways that school teachers want to see the children succeed. So there can be a conflict between the culture at home and the culture at school in defining what is good, good outcomes for children. And there have been, there can be debates about this. And I think many of the issues we see in resilience are trying to work out and resolve some of these differences when the goals of society or school or family or culture are in some sort of conflict. And it's important to work those out, and to think about it when we're doing interventions. Another controversy has centered on the question of time limits on resilience. And some people who've written about theories of resilience, or investigators have defined resilience in the short term, like in the event of an acute crisis are people doing well quickly? Others have taken a more long-term view that even if it takes you decades to get on the right road to recovery, that it still is a form of resilience, just a different long-term pattern. And this question is interesting. I, I usually favor the idea that it doesn't matter how long it takes if you get there, then I think of that as a form of resilience and I think it does sometimes take a long time to recover from really devastating, you know, disasters, or from a childhood where you had to overcome a lot of adversity. And I think that when you see people overcome these kind of difficulties, even though it takes a long time, I would consider that a form of resilience. But not everybody would agree with me. They would want to give that a different kind of name. Finally, I want to note that as new science emerges, we sometimes see new forms of old controversies because we've learned something new. And here's a couple of examples. We are seeing the trait controversy re-emerge in the study of the genetics and of resilience. People are asking the question, are there genes for resilience? Which is many ways is similar to the question of whether there's a trait for resilience. And I think we're going to struggle again with this controversy, as we try to figure out exactly how genes matter. And we've already seen and begin to learn, began to learn that genes interact with many other things in our experience, and what's important is the expression of genes and their role in resilience. But we're going to see this controversy work its way through another whole group of findings. And finally, we're seeing the idea of cost, the cost of resilience revisited as we learn more about the neurobiology of stress, and what's called alastatic load, which we've heard about already. And people raise this interesting and provocative question. This is the title of an article which you can look up. Is resilience only skin deep? This is getting at the idea that you may on the outside look very competent and successful, but on the inside you may see the effects of the stress on the body in ways that you can measure now that we didn't used to be able to measure. And I'll just leave it there. And we will take a closer look at some of the new findings in the neurobiology of resilience shortly in the course.
