Parenting and Resilience: A Literature Review (original) (raw)

In the last few years, the everyday word ‘resilience’ has captured the attention and imagination of an increasing number of academics and professionals. Resilience has positive connotations and entails understanding and seeking out good outcomes for individuals or families in circumstances where problems were to be expected. Compared with the traditional study of child development, which has tended to portray ‘normal’ and ‘abnormal’ patterns, a resilience approach offers a more differentiated account. In professional practice, resilience means looking for strengths and opportunities to build on, rather than (or alongside) problems and deficits to be remedied or treated. This review considers parents’ actual and potential contributions to children’s resilience and to parental resilience, which is sometimes subsumed within ‘family resilience’. However, since most publications are concerned with resilience in relation to children and young people, the specific role of parents often has to be inferred. The review draws on important UK-based publications on resilience and includes more selective references to the comparatively huge American literature, as well as significant material from elsewhere.