Resilience Across the Life Span

This chapter discusses the concept of resilience from a life span perspective informed by relational developmental systems theory. Resilience involves mutually benefi cial (adaptive) relations between characteristics of individuals (e.g., their self-regulation behaviors) and features of the ecology (e.g., resources promoting healthy development); these links may be represented as individual ←→ context relations, and they involve adjustment in the context of challenges or maintenance of appropriate functioning in the face of variations in the resources needed to achieve health. Resilience, then, is an attribute of positive human development (PHD) achieved through adaptive individual ←→ context relations (termed adaptive “developmental regulations”). We review research across the life span that speaks to the use of this conception of resilience for understanding the contributions individuals make to their own positive development and to the maintenance or perpetuation of PHD-supportive assets of their ecologies. Directions for further research and for applications aimed at promoting PHD are discussed. People are not resilient. Resilience is also not a functional feature of the ecology of human development (e.g., as may be represented by the concept of “protective factors”). Rather, resilience is a concept denoting that the relationship between a person and the person’s ecology has adaptive signifi cance, that is, the relationship involves a fi t between characteristics of the individual and features of his or her ecology that refl ects either adjustment (change) in the face of altered or new 276 ANNUAL REVIEW OF GERONTOLOGY AND GERIATRICS environmental threats, challenges, or “processes,” or constancy or maintenance of appropriate or healthy functioning in the face of environmental variations in the resources needed for appropriate or healthy functioning. As such, the personcontext relationship summarized by the term “resilience” refl ects individual wellbeing at a given point in time, and thriving across time, in the face of features within the ecological context that challenge adaptation. In turn, this relationship also implies that, for the ecology or context, there are actions that could maintain or further the quality of its structure (e.g., the family, educational, or health care systems) or its function in the service of supporting healthy human behavior and development (e.g., parenting that refl ects warmth and appropriate monitoring; low student–teacher ratios involving engaged students and high-quality institutions; and access to primary, secondary, and tertiary care under normative and emergency conditions, respectively). Resilience is, then, a dynamic attribute of a relationship between an individual and his or her multilevel and integrated (relational) developmental system. We represent this mutually infl uential relation between an individual and the context as individual ←→ context relations. In our view, the process of individual ←→ context relations involved in resilience is not distinct from the relations involved in human functioning in general. What is distinct, however, is that exchanges involving resilience are located at a portion of a theoretical probability distribution of these relations that may be described as involving nonnormative levels of risk or high levels of adversity (see Figure 14.1). In short, the process