Resilience is a much-talked-about topic these days. Many people want to better understand what resilience is, how it is related to the healthy development of children and youth, and what they can do to strengthen resilience in the young people in their lives. Tatyana Barankin and Nazilla Khanlou answer these and other important questions in Growing Up Resilient. What is resilience?
Resilience involves being able to recover from difficulties or change-to function as well as before and then move forward. This is often called "bouncing back" from difficulties or challenges. What determines a person's resilience?
Young people's resilience is determined by the interplay of diverse individual characteristics, characteristics of the families they live in, and characteristics of their physical and social environments.
Mental health professionals speak about risk and protective factors as key concepts to understanding resilience. Risk and protective factors are characteristics of individuals, their families and their communities or environments that either increase (protective factors) or reduce (risk factors) the likelihood that a young person will be resilient. Building resilience in children and youth
There is more than one way to help young people become resilient. Understanding the roots of resilience enables adults to use a variety of ways to build resilience in children and youth.
Caring and socially responsible adults-such as parents, other family members, neighbours, daycare workers, teachers and other school staff, spiritual leaders, health care providers, social service providers and coaches-support and facilitate young people's resilience. Resilient children can be encouraged to become more resilient. And children who seem to have less resilience can be helped to develop it.
--- from the publisher | 
