Family resilience

An important part of the heritage of family resilience is the concept of individual psychological resilience which originates from work with children focusing on what helped them become resilient in the face of adversity. Individual resilience emerged primarily in the field of developmental psychopathology as scholars sought to identify the characteristics of children that allowed them to function "OK" after adversity. Individual resilience gradually moved into understanding the processes associated with overcoming adversity, then into prevention and intervention and now focuses on examining how factors at multiple levels of the system (e.g., molecular, individual, family, community) and using interdisciplinary approaches (e.g., medical, social services, education) promote resilience. Resilience also has origins to the field of positive psychology. The term resilience gradually changed definitions and meanings, from a personality trait to a dynamic process of families, individuals, and communities.

Family resilience emerged as scholars incorporated together ideas from general systems theory perspectives on families, family stress theory, and psychological resilience perspectives. Two prominent approaches to family resilience are to view families as contexts of individual resilience and families as systems. In the field of family therapy the families as systems approach to family resilience is often used based on the assumption that significant risk, protective mechanisms, and positive adaptation occur at multiple interrelated system levels (individual, subsystem, system, or ecosystem). Thus, family resilience involves the application of concepts such as resilience, adaptation and coping to a significant stressor or adversity from a family systems perspective.

One of the common factors associated with successful adaptation and coping is identified as resilience of individual family members. Resilience can be generally defined as the ability to "bounce back" to healthy functioning when faced with significant stressors and events. The concept of resilience has been heavily researched in adolescents and now includes specific character traits and behaviors known as protective and recovery factors. Previously, researchers have focused on identifying the characteristics of resilient individuals and started to explore the possibility of family resilience and family coping with stress. Currently, researchers are focused on specific interventions to increase resilience in the family unit, while considering related genetic and environmental factors.

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