How do children overcome hazardous experiences to succeed in life? What can be done to protect young people at risk from trauma, war, disasters, and other adversities? Learn about the importance of fostering resilience in children at risk. During this course, participants will: learn how trauma can affect children and the systems they depend on, gain insight into core concepts, research methods and lessons learned in last 50 years of resilience research, learn how research is being applied in the real world through interventions that promote resilience, and engage in discussions with others who are working with children at risk around the world Participants are welcome to take the MOOC at no cost or to register for a Course Certificate ($49). Those who register and earn a Course Certificate from Coursera also are eligible to sign up for continuing education clock hours through the University of Minnesota. Participants can earn 10 clock hours of continuing education credit (added cost $99) from the College of Education and Human Development at the University of Minnesota. Go here http://z.umn.edu/1a5q to register for continuing education clock hours for completing this course.
5.6 Adaptive Systems in Culture and Community
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Resilience in Children Exposed to Trauma, Disaster and War: Global Perspectives
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University of Minnesota
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Week 5: Roles of Families, Schools, Culture, and Community in Promoting Resilience of Children
This module summarizes the findings on protective factors for resilience in children. Professor Masten presents her ideas about the adaptive systems that account for most of the capacity for resilience in children, what she has called “ordinary magic.” The roles of families, schools, and culture in resilience are discussed.
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Ann S. Masten, Ph.D., LPRegents Professor, Irving B. Harris Professor of Child Development
Institute of Child Development
Welcome back.
[SOUND] We all grow up in communities and cultures, and these communities and
cultures influence everything that we are and do, in many, many ways.
And they also influence our adaptive capacity for
dealing with adversity in our lives.
Some of the most powerful adaptive systems for
human functioning are embedded in our communities and our cultures.
Cultural influences on resilience were neglected for
a long time in the science on resilience, but increasingly in re,
recent years, there's growing attention, among investigators,
to try to understand how culture supports resilience in human development.
One of the groups that has led this effort is
located at the Resilience Centre, Research Centre in Halifax, and
a team that's been led by Michael Unger and colleagues all around the world,
in the International Resilience Project has devoted themselves to
trying to understand some of the ways in which culture is involved in resilience.
They have developed new methods for measuring and studying resilience, and
they have implemented research on five different continents and in 40, 14
different communities to try to get both a qualitative and a research understanding
of how resilience works in different kinds of cultures and communities.
In one of their projects, called the Resilience Pathways Project, Theron and
colleagues have studied Basotho youth in South Africa.
And in this community, a high value is placed on a concept called Botho.
And in this,
this is an idea that is very important to be connected to your community.
This philosophy of light emphasizes the interdependence of
people with other people in their community.
And in their research, they identified a group of people,
young people who they felt showed resilience in this community.
And then studied what they were like.
And their research indicated that the young people who were doing well in this
South African community were flexible, determined, had good communication skills.
They were felt and were observed to be connected to the community.
They were invested in education, and they also had vision and goals for the future.
And many of these characteristics can be observed in
other young people who are viewed as resilient around the world.
We also can think about developmental tasks.
These criteria by which we decide if people are doing well in life.
Children or adults.
Can be thought about in terms of culture because developmental tasks can
vary across different cultures.
Some are global and universal, for example, all over the world cultures and
people of many different kinds expect their children to learn to walk,
to learn to talk and speak the language of the family and community.
But some of the developmental tasks in different cultures and
communities are more unique.
For example, there may be traditional skills.
Weaving skills, hunting skills, cooking skills that children or
young people are expected to learn that are very specific and
characteristic of, of a particular ethnicity of culture.
And some of the developmental tasks of young people are related to
multiculturalism itself.
So, many young people around the world nowadays move,
they move from one culture to another, they emigrate to a new country.
Or we have communities where there are more than one
culture living together in the same location.
And often young people who live in multiple cultures have to
learn how to navigate their way in different cultures.
For example many immigrants learn to speak more than one language.
They learn how they learn about success in two different cultures, the culture of
their home, or origin and also the culture of the new community, or the new school.
In Minnesota one of the states of the United States where I live, we have many
cultures living here who have come over centuries to live in the same place.
And we see many different kinds of expectations for young people.
Some are shared and some are unique.
And some of the young people here, have to learn to move back and
forth between different kinds of cultural expectations in their own
native culture and also in the culture that you see in the schools.
One of the interesting ideas in multiculturalism and
immigration is the idea of the immigrant paradox.
This idea, is, is based on the observations that sometimes,
not always, but sometimes immigrants who move into a new
community or culture actually do better in the first generation
better than the native born people in that community and and better than
later born members of that immigrant community second or third generation.
And people have been interested in why that might be.
What would explain the immigrant paradox when you see this kind of phenomena.
And one thought is that maybe people who
immigrate that first generation are exceptional in some way.
That they are particularly competent or resilient in some way.
Or, it could be that the immigrants, the new immigrants who come to a community,
bring with them important cultural protective factors from their culture of
origin, that promotes success in the new community but
are gradually lost over time through the process of acculturation.
There's a growing interest around the world in immigrant youth and
that's because we have so many young people for various reasons
sometimes related to war or disasters and sometimes related to economic opportunity,
who are moving around with and without their families to new cultures.
We have high rates of immigrant youth around the world.
And the receiving countries of these immigrant youth are very concerned and
interested in their success and they should be, because they represent
an enormous source of capital, human capital for the future of many countries.
And a group of us got together, with support from the Jacobs Foundation,
to have a conference on resilience in immigrant youth.
And a book came out of that called,
Realizing The Potential of Immigrant Youth.
And there were different disciplines and scientists attending that conference and
talking about what can we do?
How can we invest in the success of immigrant youth?
Because no matter how much an immigrant youth and
family brings to a new land, they need opportunities and support over time to be,
to be resilient, successful, and contribute to that new society.
We need more research on diverse cultures around the world on all of
the practices and traditions that may support and
promote resilience in different kinds of situations.
We have a lot more to learn about cultural influences on resilience and
the protective factors that are embedded in the many cultures of the world.
One of the most important parts of culture around the world are religion and
spiritual beliefs.
These are frequently implicated by case reports of resilience as well
as studies of resilience, that people report that their spiritual beliefs or
their religion made a difference in helping them
come through a difficult situation or struggle through to resilience.
How do these spiritual beliefs or practices make a difference?
Well, one of the things that I found very striking over the years trying to learn
about different spiritual practices and religions and how they help young people
in their resilience, is how much these cultural and spiritual practices engage
the same adaptive systems that I think are implicated by the short list.
And I've provided some examples here, and I'll just mention a few of them.
Religions around the world, and spiritual beliefs and practices
often provide us with relationships and the support of attachment relationships
to both spiritual, of a spiritual nature and also of a human nature,
in the leadership of, and community of the people who are part of that religion.
Also, many religions around the world teach their people and
give them opportunities to learn self-regulation skills related to
things like meditation, or prayer, or mindfulness training.
We also know that religions provide many rituals and special practices
to help people deal with many of the major life events that humans experience,
ranging from the birth of a new child to the ceremonies of death.
We also have religions practicing rites of passage,
celebrating the transitions to adulthood or learn, you know,
having ceremonies and challenges so young people can prove themselves as they choose
to join the life in an adult form in a reli, in the religious practices.
Religions also provide guidelines and rules for
living that can provide guidance to people, wisdom that's accumulated over
the centuries, and also religions provide a social community.
In many religious practices when people are in trouble,
their religious community will provide, will help them out,
will provide them with financial resources, with food,
with spiritual support, and many other kinds of help.
I do want to raise a cautionary note which is that, although religion and
spirituality it, it can provide important protective influences for resilience,
it's also the case that these practices can be hijacked and
misdirected at harmful goals.
So, sometimes in the name of religion or spirituality,
children can be harmed by discrimination, by oppression, by wars and
conflicts that break out between people, and by crimes against humanity.
It, that are offered in the name of a particular religion.
And globally, we often struggle with trying to
reconcile conflicting beliefs and practices.
So powerful adaptive systems, can be put to powerful and positive uses
in resilience of children, but they also can be used to harm children as well.
It's just important that we remember that.
There are many adaptive systems in communities,
we're only going to talk about a few of them here.
For example, our education systems are important in the lives of children.
But we also in communities have emergency systems, health care systems,
sanitation systems, and many other systems that have
evolved over time because they help communities function better.
We have laws and policies in governments of
communities at many different levels to support family and child life.
And one of the investigators who is really studying the resilience in
communities is Fran Norris and her colleagues, and
they point out that the adaptive capabilities of communities vary.
How well is a community prepared for
terrorist attack or a disaster of some kind?
We can improve, the resilience of communities by building up
the capacities to withstand different kinds of surprises or calamities.
And there's a lot of interesting in building resilient cities and
communities around the world.
I'm just going to close by asking you to think about the protective
factors in your own community, or cultural, or culture or religion.
As you think about what we're learning in this class, what would you point to in
your own culture and community that makes a difference that protects children and
young people as they try to overcome challenges.
[SOUND]
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