Amy Eva Alberts Warren

Resilience and Positive Youth Development: A Relational Developmental Systems Model

Adolescents are not resilient. Resilience is also not a functional feature of the ecology of adolescent development (e.g., as may be represented by the concept of “protective factors”). Rather, resilience is a concept denoting that the relationship between an adolescent and his or her ecology has adaptive significance. That is, the relationship involves a fit between characteristics of an individual youth and features of his or her ecology that reflects either adjustment (change) in the face of altered or new 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 individual–context relationship summarized by the term “resilience” reflects individual well-being at a given point in time, and thriving across the adolescent period, 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, schools, or community programs for youth development) or its function in the service of supporting healthy adolescent behavior and development (e.g., parenting that reflects warmth and appropriate monitoring; low student–teacher ratios involving engaged students and high quality institutions; and access to competent, caring, and committed mentors in out-of-school-time [OST] youth development programs, respectively).

Chapter 14 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 beneficial (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.