Research suggests that the best way to improve the educational, social and health outcomes of young people is to invest in resilience-building measures.
Resilience is the ability to rise above or bounce back from adversity. Resilience results from the presence of basic human protective systems and builds in a person as they develop confidence in their skills and abilities, their families, their relationships, and their communities (Masten & Gewirtz, 2006).
Resilience is often included in discussions about risk and protective factors. The idea is that the more protective factors children have in their lives, the more resilient they will be in the face of obstacles or challenging circumstances. But the precise relationship between risk and protective factors and health outcomes is complex and messy, like everything else involving human beings. What we do know is that risk factors alone do not accurately predict outcome (Derzon, 2007). After all, some children with significant risk factors succeed despite adversity while others do not.
Making sense of resilience and risk factors may require stepping back and looking at the whole picture, or the “ecosystem” in which young people are meant to function. Like frogs in a toxic pond, young people made to live in or adapt to an unhealthy environment will struggle to both survive and thrive (though some will manage, against the odds). And just as truly helping those frogs would require cleaning up the pond (rather than focusing on each frog’s individual problems), helping young people means enhancing the health of their environments—their homes, schools and communities—and in the process diluting the risks or “toxins” that cannot be filtered out.
Building resilience and protective factors is more important than mitigating or preventing risk factors. But just how a school sets up their policies to highlight resilience over risk depends on the type and degree of attention administrators give to these three interconnected elements.
Asset-focused approaches seek to build on and support the personal capital of the child. This perspective resists labelling children and adjusting our expectations accordingly. It recognizes that the most significant risk factors are located in the community and environment rather than the individual or family. Providing a safe context characterized by caring relationships, appropriate expectations and opportunities for participation and contribution will allow the innate assets of children to flourish (Benard, 2000). Schools can provide a range of activities that allow children to explore various ways of expression and achievement. Celebrating individual and group successes will help reinforce self-efficacy and motivation.
Reducing the exposure of children to preventable risk is important, even in an asset-focused environment. Care must be taken, however, not to “personalize” risk in the individual or family but to recognize risk as a contextual quality often shaped by social and organizational policy. For schools, risk reduction might involve articulating appropriate expectations, providing orientations to smooth transitions, providing supports to ensure academic success, and ensuring a safe environment.
Attention to mobilizing the fundamental protective systems for development is critical. For schools, this might include providing teachers with more training or resources to maximize effectiveness in the classroom, ensuring that every student is matched to a staff member who builds an effective and caring relationship with the child, and providing a rich array of activities that link students with each other in multiple ways.
In the school context, protective factors include positive school and teacher bonding (especially for ages five to 11), opportunities and rewards for school involvement, and peer bonding (Loxley, Toumbourou, Stockwell, Haines, Scott, & Godfrey, 2004).
There is good evidence suggesting that supportive and caring relationships within schools promote academic motivation and performance among students (West, 2006). Students with positive teacher, learning and social connectedness also fare best in terms of later mental health and reduced involvement in health risk behaviours (Resnick, et al., 1997).
Much of the school connection research is not designed to determine how much of the sense of connection comes from attributes of teachers and school culture and how much is due to student traits and motivation, or even parent or neighbourhood attributes. However, some evidence suggests that students who attended elementary schools that had a positive school “ethos” (i.e., students felt attached to school, engaged in education, and got along with their teachers) were less likely to smoke, drink and use illegal drugs at age 13 and 15 than students attending schools with a poor “ethos” (West, Sweeting, & Leyland, 2004).
School substance use policies should focus on maximizing the opportunities and rewards for school involvement. These approaches will be more effective than those which concentrate on measures to identify the presence or use of drugs and respond with punitive consequences. Punitive programs often leave young people less connected and more vulnerable than they were at the outset. Deterrent intention does not always translate into deterrent effect and, when it does not, it may result in a failure to exercise the duty of care (Norden, 2005).
The main goal should be to optimize the students’ relationship with the school so that it can provide a stable protective force in their lives. Rather than focusing on substance use per se, these initiatives should seek to facilitate meaningful connections between staff, students and parents as a way of achieving broad benefits both academically and in terms of well-being.
Teachers have a great capacity to contribute to the well-being and academic success of their students. Even students with multiple risk factors who perceive a connectedness with teachers are less likely to become involved in harmful substance use or other problem behaviours than counterparts who do not feel connected (Voisin, Salazar, Crosby, DiClemente, Yarber, & Staples-Horne, 2005). Ongoing teacher connectedness can offset the effects of poorer social connections (Bond, et al., 2007). School policy should ensure teachers receive appropriate training, understand the conceptual model and feel supported in their efforts to build resilience in their students.
The nature and quality of the relationships students have with their peers determine whether they have a protective or risk enhancing effect. For example, positive social connections can act as a protective factor (Roche, 2006). An inclusive school culture that provides a framework for positive attitudes and actions among all school participants will help build resilience (Deed, 2006). On the other hand, if a young person’s social life is characterized by bullying or being threatened, their social connections will have a risk-enhancing effect. Similarly, bonding with peers who engage in problematic substance use can also enhance a student’s risk. For these reasons, school policy should ensure attention to the development of a peer connectedness system.
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Bond, L., Butler, H., Thomas, L., Carlin, J., Glover, S., Bowes, G., et al. (2007). Social and school connectedness in early secondary school as predictors of late teenage substance use, mental health, and academic outcomes. Journal of Adolescent Health , 40 (4), 357.
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Loxley, W., Toumbourou, J., Stockwell, T., Haines, B., Scott, K., & Godfrey, C. (2004). The Prevention of Substance Use, Risk and Harm in Australia: A Review of the Evidence. Perth, Australia: National Drug Research Institute and the Centre for Adolescent Health.
Masten, A., & Gewirtz, A. (2006). Resilience in development: The importance of early childhood. In Encyclopedia on Early Childhood Development. Montreal: Centre of Excellence for Early Childhood Development.
Norden, P. (2005). Keeping Them Connected: A National Study Examining How Catholic Schools Can Best Respond to Incidents of Illicit Drug Use. Richmond, Victoria, Australia: Jesuit Social Services, Ignatius Centre for Social Policy and Research.
Resnick, M., Bearman, P., Blum, R., Bauman, K., Harris, K., Jones, J., et al. (1997). Protecting adolescents from harm: Findings from the longitudinal study on adolescent health. Journal of the American Medical Association, 278 (10), 823-32.
Roche, A. (2006). The role of 'school' versus education: Social capital, connectedness and resilience. In R. Midford, & G. Munro (Eds.), Drug Education in Schools: Searching for the Silver Bullet. Melbourne, Australia: IP Communications.
Voisin, D., Salazar, L., Crosby, R., DiClemente, R., Yarber, W., & Staples-Horne, M. (2005). Teacher connectedness and health-related outcomes among detailed adolescents. Journal of Adolescent Health, 37, 337.
West, P. (2006). School effects research provide new and stronger evidence in support of the health-promoting school idea. Health Education, 106 (6), 421-424.
West, P., Sweeting, H., & Leyland, A. (2004). School effects on pupils’ health behaviours: Evidence in support of the health promoting school. Research Papers in Education, 19 (3), 261-291.