Welcome back. In this segment, we're going to talk about family, and family resilience which is vitally important in the lives of everyone, and particularly in the lives of children. Trying to understand how children adapt in the face of adversity. Families play many roles in the lives of children. They not only nurture and promote human development, but they also actively protect children. If they understand that a threat is coming now, immediately, or a threat is coming in the future, they can take action to protect their children. At the same time that they help children learn their own coping skills. Children have to be able to manage stress and manage adversity, so chil, so parents can't protect children so much that they never learn how to deal with challenges. It's important that children experience some stress and, and learn how to deal with it. Extensive research has shown that good parenting plays two major roles in resilience. One is promotive, just generally supporting positive adaptation in children. And the other protective. You may remember, we talked about promotive and protective factors. Protective roles are important and special when there's a lot of adversity and risk. We also know from research that effective parenting can be learned. And there is a lot of evidence of the kind that demonstrate this where, there is a randomized experiment comparing two groups where people are just put into the two groups by chance, and then they train one set of parents to improve their skills or whatever it is they are targeting and there the studies that show, how effective this can be. Parents can learn how to parent their children more effectively, which helps children in normal development and also can be targeted at children who are facing particular situations. One of the important roles of families is to provide family routines and rituals. Families have lots of different kinds of routines and rituals around the world. And these play an important role in resilience, as well everyday life. An example of family routines are family meals. And, one of the researchers who's made a huge contribution in understanding the importance of family, routines in human life is Barbara Fiese and her research team. And they've studied family meals and how they work and how they function to give both parents and children and other family members a sense of closeness, community, communication, and many other roles. Families that have rituals for meals and spend time together on routine things like that are often closer and communicating well with each other. And some of these rituals are routine like every day, they have their meals together, and some of them are special occasion routines. There may be routines for birthdays or holidays of some kind. Many families around the world also have bedtime rituals that are intended to be, calming and soothing to children, and help them go to sleep that might include stories and songs or bath time. These kind of routine are very, reassuring to both the children and other family members, and it's very striking in the aftermath of disasters or other calamities. You see, you can see that an important part of recovery. For families to be able to restore that sense of normal life that comes from these kind of routines and rituals. Here are some examples of interventions that have shown that you can improve the quality of parenting and that that makes a difference for the development of children. And particularly high risk children so these are studies have important implications for resilience. One of the most widely researched interventions for families is a home visiting programs and perhaps the most famous Nurse-Family Partnership and his colleagues. Many, experiments have shown that this is effective, where a nurse visits the family and the, family learns about how to take care of a young baby. And the nurse may do that for a couple of years, providing advice and guidance and support to a young family, and that appears to make a real difference in the development of young children. As they grow up, another intervention that's been widely implemented around the world is often nicknamed P, PMTO. This is, stands for Parent Management Training Oregon model. And it ca, came out of the Oregon Social Learning Center. And the wonderful work that Jerry Patterson. Mary Forgatch and many other members of their team over the years have developed to teach parents and parenting skills. They specialize in helping parents learn how to manage child behavior and family life. And they particularly have worked with, family, families where the children may be at risk for growing up and having behavior problems or already having behavior problems. This, their methods have proven to be very effective with different kinds of families around the world and some countries have implemented their program at the country level successfully and that has happened in Norway for example. Alicia Lieberman, and others have developed something called Child parent psychotherapy. This is a method for teaching parents, young parents or older parents of very young children, how to be sensitive and responsive and understanding. To young children, particularly children who've either already been traumatized or at high risk for trauma, exposure. To improve the quality of the parent-child interaction, this kind of intervention is really focused on the attachment system and improving the way that a, attachment system works for the development of a young child. Another example is the New Beginnings program. This is for older children and this intervention was developed by a team at Arizona State University. By Wolchik and Sandler who were trying to help families who were coping with divorce. And they, they learned in their experiments that, that family groups that helped parents learn how to help their children, that were more elementary-age children, maybe. 8, 9, 10, 11 year olds. What could they do, as parents, in, in the middle of a divorce situation so that their children would handle it better, and where all family members would function better. They've done research showing that, that this method is effective. And they've done long term follow up showing that the effects of this intervention, even though the intervention itself is brief in time, that it can have lasting effects on how well the child and family functions later on. Children depend on families and so, I think a very important case can be made that child resilience is likely to be linked to family resilience. And some people study family resilience at the level of family. Instead of studying the resilience of individual members of the family, there are social scientists and clinicians who are interested in how well the family is functioning as a unit and they focus instead of individual people. On how a family is doing and how a family is developing, changing, and responding to challenges and threats to that family. And what they've learned about family adaptation has many implications for child resilience because it does appear that when a family is handling adversity well that that provides a buffering system, a protective system, for the children who are members of that family. We also know from a lot of interesting research that one of the ways that dress affects children is through its impact on members of the family or how well the family is functioning so, economic stress can disrupt the family's functioning. So can a crisis of some kind in the workplace. Or a crisis like the Great Depression, for example. Or a terrorist attack. These can enter into the family system and make it difficult for family members to function well to provide that kind of buffer and support for the members of the family. When the family breaks down or doesn't function well, that's an enormous threat to children. And it's particularly threatening if you have adversity and violence arising within the family, because then you have a challenge right in, proximal to the child, and the family isn't functioning very well to protect the child. Family resilience has been studied for decades by a group of scientists who are interested in the, how families work and particularly, in helping families. They are family clinicians and family therapists. And it's interesting to me that for many decades this work kind of proceeded separately from the science on child resilience. Even though everybody kind of understood that family resilience and child resilience must be related to each other. And now, there's a growing interest in trying to integrate those two, fields of science. We also know that families depend on communities. And so there is an interest in community resilience as well. In the next segment, I'm going to have you watch a little video that, a little short interview, it's only about three minutes long, that I made with Froma Walsh, who is perhaps the world's leading expert on. Family resilience while we were both in that summer school teaching students about resilience at different levels of analysis. So, meet Froma Walsh. So, you have been working in the field of family resilience for many years. >> Mm-hm. >> And, I'm so happy you could be here. And tell us. How you think about family resilience? >> Well, I think first I was very much influenced by my doctoral work in human development because it corrected the over-focus on psychopathology that I found in the clinical field. And so much attention was focused to how families fail. And the deficits in families and I was interested in understanding what makes the difference. When families are under stress they don't all fail. What about the ones who do well? And what can we learn from research on families that do well and, in turn, their children do well? >> In the years you've been working on family resilience what changes have you seen in the way therapists practice family resilience, or in the research? >> Even the field of family therapy in the initial phase we broadened the lens from the traditional focus on mother infant and mother child. To include the network of relationships that are important not only in early childhood but throughout life and at the end very much so in later life. And even so, the field tended to be focuses on pathology and reducing risk, reducing problems. And, over the last decade or more, the field of family systems, interventions, have moved toward building strengths. Shifting from diagnosing what's wrong with families, to searching for strengths and resources in families. And then directing our intervention to expand on those and to build those that in families that are more vulnerable. And the resilience literature was very much of interest to me, because the early family systems research tended to be with families that were not under stress. And it tended to be two parent families raising an adolescent because that was of most interest. But, as families have become more diverse and their challenges are varied, we need to really think about a concept that is more flexible. And doesn't type families. And, to me, resilience was exactly the right concept at the right time. Because it focuses on families, in the context of stress facing challenges. And it can be adapted to many different contexts, many different family forms. And family values. >> What are, what are your hopes for the future of family resilience. >> Well, I think it's very difficult to get research funding for family based studies. They are more difficult when you start to take in, to account the complexity of relationships. Not only in the household, but in the role of extended family members, and not just in risks, but as resources. And then we have to take into account the wider context of the socio-demographic variables, the cultural, and spiritual resources. So the studies are by nature, much more complex, but that's the real world. >> Thank you so much for joining us.
