Chapter 3 - Harnessing ‘resilience’ when working with children and families

Summary

Learning goals

This chapter will enable you to:

1. Recognise how ‘resilience’ can highlight pathways and outcomes for vulnerable children and families

2. Consider how resilience might be best defined as an ongoing interaction between the person and their environment

3. Identify the risk and protective factors that underpin the process of resilience

4. Discover some of the practical applications that draw upon the concept of resilience

5. Understand the organisational and individual factors that can drive preferences for practice, including the likely practical uptake of concepts like ‘resilience’

6. Learn how resilience-based practice guidance might help organise the ways in which practitioners and organisations engage with vulnerable children and families.

Introduction

Working with vulnerable children and families is a complex and ongoing process. Since vulnerable families often have multiple and complex needs, practitioners who work with them need to try to address both immediate issues such as physical safety and shelter, alongside longer term needs such as promoting good parenting and enabling individual behaviour change away from problems such as drug and alcohol misuse. As the problems that families and children facing hardship endure are complex and multifaceted, practitioners cannot rely on any one single method or theory in their practice, but instead need to adopt a practice philosophy that is able to consider families' strengths, weaknesses, needs, challenges, and priorities in a holistic and coherent way.