Prevention Works!

Resilience and Youth

Many adolescents, even though living in high-risk environments, seem to possess personal resilience that helps them avoid alcohol, tobacco, and drug use. How is it that, despite their exposure to severe risk factors, these youths are able to develop social competence, overcome the odds and lead drug-free lives?

Research suggests that most children are born with innate resiliency and have an inborn capacity for self-correction, transformation, and change. Identifying the protective factors that some adolescents possess and determining how they can be instilled in all youth is a current challenge to the prevention field. Why do some, but not all, children have resilience or protective factors that help them overcome risks and adversity?

The protective factors commonly found in resilient individuals include:

• Social competence (responsiveness, cultural flexibility, empathy, caring, communication skills, and a sense of humor).
• Problem-solving (planning, teamwork, and critical and creative thinking).
• Autonomy (sense of identity, self-efficacy, self-awareness, task-mastery, and adaptive distancing from negative messages and conditions).
• A sense of purpose and belief in a bright future (goal direction, educational aspirations, optimism, faith, and spiritual connectedness).

For children in high-risk environments, studies suggest that they have a better chance of growing into healthy adulthood if they:

• Can learn to do one thing well that is valued by themselves, their peers, and their community.
• Are required to be helpful as they grow up.
• Are able to ask for help for themselves.
• Are able to elicit positive responses from others in their environment.
• Are able to distance themselves from negative situations.
• Are able to bond with a socially valued, positive entity, such as the family, school, or community groups.
• Are able to interact with a caring adult who provides consistent, caring responses.

The major implication from resiliency research is that if we hope to prevent alcohol, tobacco, and drug use, then our primary focus should be on meeting youths’ basic needs for caring, connectedness, respect, challenge, power, and meaning.

Programs that successfully facilitate the development of youth’s resilience are those that

• Establish safety and basic trust through caring relationships that are grounded in listening and convey compassion, understanding, respect, and interest.
• Communicate high expectation messages that provide firm guidance, structure, and challenge as well as convey a belief in the youth’s innate resilience by focusing on strengths and assets, as opposed to problems and deficits.
• Create opportunities for the youth’s meaningful participation in and contribution to the community.

Ultimately, resilience is a process of connectedness and of linking to people, to interests, and to community--weaving children into our social fabric. Effective prevention programs must reinforce the natural social bonds between people within every arena.

Sources: Benard, Bonnie, From Research To Practice, Resiliency in Action, Winter 1996. For more information on Resiliency in Action, visit their Web site at: http://www.resiliency.com/. Prevention Primer: Resilience/Protective Factors, Resources for Prevention, March 1997. This source is available on the Internet at: http://ncadi.samhsa.gov:80/pubs/primer/resfact.aspx.

To receive a complimentary copy of this PreventionAlert, call SAMSHA's National Clearinghouse for Alcohol and Drug Information (NCADI) @ 1-800-729-6686, TDD 1-800-487-4889 (for the hearing impaired.) PREVENTIONAlert is supported by the Center for Substance Abuse Prevention of the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, and may be copied without permission with appropriate citation. For information about PREVENTIONAlert, please contact CSAP by phone (301) 443-0581 or e-mail gensley@samhsa.gov

Return to Table of Contents for Volume I
Return to Table of Contents for Volume II
Return to Top of Page