Today’s world is awash in miracle self-help cures for our lack of “resilience” and it has now welled-up in our schools. Mindfulness, neuroplasticity, trauma-informed cognitive behavioural therapy, psychoanalysis, career coaching, and yoga are all being adopted by well-meaning educators. Children and teens who are identified as anxious, hyper-active, overweight or downhearted are far too often pathologized as having “mental health issues.” Hordes of gurus and experts are ready with the latest inspirational programs and quick fixes for all their problems.
Pursuing individual social well-being is not the answer, particularly for troubled, at-risk, and struggling children and youth. That is one of the most fundamental lessons conveyed in Michael Ungar’s latest book, Change Your World (2019), a masterful synthesis of 20 years of research in the field of resilience. It will be an eye-opener to all who were, up until now, unacquainted with his ground-breaking work assessing the effectiveness of at-risk services for children and youth.
The first wave of New Age self-help came through the medium of TED Talks peaking in the late 2000s. Educational gurus mimicking Sir Ken Robinson were full of magic solutions to cure every conceivable ill besetting students, teachers, and school communities. Dr. Ungar has little use for such solutions because they seldom work. “Self-help fixes are like empty calories,” he writes. “The effects are fleeting and often detrimental in the long term. Worse, they promote victim blaming. The notion that your resilience is your problem alone is ideology, not science.”
Ungar is clear about what went wrong. “We have been giving people the wrong message. Resilience is not a DIY endeavour. Self-help fails because the stresses that put our lives in jeopardy in the first place remain in the world around us even after we’ve taken the “cures.” The fact is that people who can find the resources they require for success in their environments are far more likely to succeed than individuals with positive thoughts and the latest power poses.”
Studying resilience around the world through his Resilience Research Centre at Dalhousie University produced some profound lessons. Some young people and adults “beat the odds” better than expected, especially those in war-torn societies and disaster zones. The reason has more to do with their social and physical environments than with personal traits such as “grit,” “growth mindset.” or “self-regulation.” Changing the environments has more of an impact than changing outlooks and mindsets or even offering formal programs.
Services provided by health, social welfare and educational systems, Ungar and his research team discovered, are rarely assessed for their effectiveness in helping children, youth or adults “bounce back” from adversity or escape the bonds of dependence. For a professional social worker, Ungar is not afraid to pose the tough questions. What actually works in nurturing well-being and building resilience? Most importantly, does resilience depend on the services we receive?
Ungar’s Resilience Research Centre focuses on adolescents and young adults who are using multiple services. Many of his subjects are young people needing special educational supports at the same time that they are under the supervision of a child-welfare worker because of exposure to family violence. Some are youth with severe mental-health problems such as attention-deficit disorder and conduct disorder serving probation orders for drug offenses or violent acts. Other participants have learning challenges,including anxiety disorders. The balance are homeless because they had run away from abusive parents.
His initial study of Canadian youth examined the relationship between risk exposure, resilience and behavioural outcomes for almost 500 young people, all of them facing serious challenges. It was later expanded to include more than 7,000 young people around the world. The overall conclusion was that “resilience depends more on what we receive than what we have within us.” Providing supportive environments and needs-based resources, more than individual talent or positive attitude, accounted for the difference between youths who did well and those who slid into drug addiction, truancy and high-risk sexual activity.
School systems do not always fare well in Ungar’s resilience research findings. Education district offices and schools can be resistant to tailoring their programs and services to meet student an d family needs. One common example – school guidance counsellors who insisted that parents take time off from minimum-wage jobs to attend case conferences because guidance counsellors and psychometricians do not work evenings. The results were predictable: “the most vulnerable families did not show up because they could not afford the lost time at work. It was their children, doubly disadvantaged by learning difficulties and poverty, who wound up untreated and who eventually dropped out of school.”
“Student well-being” was sanctified in the Ontario school system from 2010 to 2018 and is now being mimicked in other Canadian provincial school systems. Yet Canadian resilience research demonstrates that social, economic and communitarian contexts and supports are far more important to student health, fitness, and financial security than our individual thoughts, feelings or behaviours. “When it comes to maintaining well-being and finding success,” Ungar claims, “environments matter.” A positive attitude helps students and adults capitalize on opportunities, but “positive thinking” on its own does not help in surviving childhood abuse, crime-ridden neighbourhoods, or natural disasters.
Why do today’s pop culture gurus, child psychologists, and behavioural therapists put so much faith in miracle cures and self-help strategies? How and why have educators embraced those approaches? What can be learned from Michael Ungar’s ground-breaking research? To what extent is what’s surrounding us more important that what’s within us when it comes to developing resilience in school and in life?
Educhatter 