Resilient, or…?
June 2, 2010
This week’s E-Journal features Jesse Oakes’ new article on the study of resilience and its implications for youth ministry. Let me give you a hint up-front if you like research: check out the footnotes. This guy has done his homework (something we admire at FYI). But he’s done it for the love of kids, as a practicing high school pastor.
One part of the article is particularly intriguing to me, asking the question: What (and who) defines “health”? Overall health (physical, emotional, spiritual, intellectual) can be hard to really pinpoint, and we tend to define it based on the biases of our respective viewpoints. But check out this insight (I’m directly pulling from the article here) from the work of researcher Anita Hunter:1
Analysis of focus group data gathered from teenagers in the United States and Africa revealed that young people often overcome adversity by internalizing their pain, rationalizing it by denying their self-worth, isolating themselves physically, and insulating themselves internally from their feelings. In essence, the students made “survival” their primary (and perhaps, their singular) goal. “Resilience” for them was the process of borrowing against their emotional future in order to keep themselves together in the present.
Read that last line again. Borrowing against their emotional future in order to keep themselves together in the present. Know any kids who have survived this way? I sure have. And when I think about them, I realize that some of them are the ones we most let down in youth ministry. We praised their resilience without really being a helpful part of shalom-health in their lives. Take a look at the article and add to the conversation—when have you seen resilience have a shadow side, and what can we do to nurture the healthiest kind of resilience?
- Anita Hunter, “A Cross-Cultural Comparison of Resilience in Adolescents,” Journal of Pediatric Nursing 16, no. 3 (June 2001): 172-179. [↩]
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