Review: The Dynamics of Resilient Families
I'm doing some background source reviews for a chapter I'm throwing together on the topic of Resilience and Children (with Dr. Kristen Carr, TCU), and came across a citation I wanted to check out. Here is my 5-minute (ish) summary, providing an overview of the purpose of the book, and hopefully some meaningful take-aways!
As explained in the introduction, The Dynamics of Resilient Families, is the result of an "innovative roundtable conference" held at the Univ. of Wiconsin-Madison campus. A roundtable conference could be anything from an invite only hang out with some smart guest speakers, to an actual conference with a panel on this topic that everyone collected contact info from attendees then proposed this idea. Either way, it pays to attend conferences to meet people into the topics you're into!
This book is an edited volume, meaning different experts contribute chapters on a variety of topics under the theme of hte title, with usually a variety of writing styles and research approaches. This entire volume embraces scholarship with qualitiative, inductive approaches, which the editors suggest "allows novel themes to emerge about central issues to family studies." (ix) Where there is a lack of theories to adequately explain "newish" perspectives on social phenomena, this inductive approach is definitely appropriate.
The editors note that all of the researchers did not set out to study resilience: Resilience emerged as a central theme of the scholarship. Given that these investigations are set within family experiences like health crises or challenges, domestic abuse, job loss, or lifestyle complications, it suggests a theme for researchers on the hunt for resilience: It's challenging to see "resilience" when there is an absense of challenge, or adversity. How would you know it's working? In times of low stress, the low resilience, well functioning student looks no different than the high resilience, well functioning student. Right?
So what? Well if parents are constantly creating "low stress" circumstances for their children (i.e., coddling, shielding, "in the bubble", helicopter parenting even) from a developmental standpoint it would be hard to see how resilience-promoting competencies would develop. Sure some would naturally emerge as a part of participating in typical well functioning social interaction (e.g., friendships, finding trusted adults to rely on, empathy) but what's missing?
The volume goes on to provide chapters that highlight that important aspects of family resilience include: Adaptation and creation of meaning, reorganization of self, goals, and relationships, use of day-to-day coping strategies, as well as the painful acknowledgement and facing unwanted family crisis.
Due to the underlying emphasis on job-related circumstances as a central concern for family functioning, I focued more on the chapter related to changing and challenging economic circumstances for Northeasten Fishing Families (Helen J. Mederer). The one sentence overview here is that a series of changes in the mid-1990s affected the livelihood of fisherman in New England; A series of semi-structured interviews of boat owners and crew members and their families highlights some meaningful take-aways:
Fisherman's Life and the isolation of the family and the fisherman reminds me a bit of descriptions of Miliary spouse's family experiences. For instance, mentions of "it's a way of life," "in my blood," and a strong sense of community within fisher families. There is also a nice summary there of patterns of fisher family characteristics, that when removing "fishing" references looks very simliar to summaries of the military family experience. (207-208)
Mederer makes this point when discussing the reintegration of fisherman after being at see for a while, and rejoining the family (not unlike reintegration after deployment); The author compares this to POW literature, but I don't think it needs to go that far to be comparible. (214)
Draws upon Rutter's (1987) ideas of "key elements of resiliency": "Personality features, such as self-esteem; family cohesion and an absense of discord; and the availabity of external support systems that encourage and reinforce coping efforts." (220) Adds the resileince is not only having these things, but life experiences that promote the development of those things (Conger & Elder, 1994)
Features of resilience for these families included (223): Boundary flexiblity (i.e., adaptable family member roles, shared tasks, interchangeable parts in family functioning), availability of social support (close kinship networks, fishing community), foresight and planning with regard to family finance (to minimize the decline in family living standards during lean times).
Finally, Mederer uses some cool terminology for a
subsection: "Macrosocial Context of Resilience." This is a label for the circumstances within our larger social and community situation that enable easier solutions to the challenges we face. For instance having a health issue and having universal health care available. Losing your house and having housing options available in your city. Failing a class in college you need to graduate and having a range of tutors and professor availability as a part of policy and value systems to lean on (so you're not enacting these yourself, or having to be over-creative to find these resources). The label and concept is interesting, especially since I've been thinking of Bronfenbrener's socioecological model (1979, see image) the whole time I've been reading Mederer's research.
There is clearly more here, and worthy of a part II...I may get to that as a blog post in the future, or it just may receive a more adequate citation and import into the chapter I'm working towards! -GB
References:
Bronfenbrenner, Urie (1979). The Ecology of Human Development: Experiments by Nature and Design. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ISBN 0-674-22457-4.
McCubbin, H. I., Thompson, E. A., Thompson, A. I., & Futrell, J. A. (Eds.)(1999). The Dynamics of Resilient Families. Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications.
