The impact of youth-adult relationships on resilience

Abstract

Distinguishing between population-wide strengths and processes associated with youth resilience, this paper shows that engaging and transformative youth-adult relationships exert the greatest impact on youth who are the most marginalized. This pattern of differential impact demonstrates that the factors that contribute to resilience, such as engagement, are contextually sensitive. For youth with the fewest resources, engagement may influence their life trajectories more than for youth with greater access to supports. Case material and research that shows the link between resilience and engagement of youth with adults is discussed as a way to show that resilience is not an individual quality, but instead a quality of the interaction between individuals and their environments. The benefits of youth-adult partnerships are realized for marginalized youth when specific conditions that promote interactions that contribute to resilience are created.

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THE IMPACT OF YOUTH-ADULT RELATIONSHIPS ON RESILIENCE
Michael Ungar
Abstract: Distinguishing between population-wide strengths and processes associated
with youth resilience, this paper shows that engaging and transformative youth-adult
relationships exert the greatest impact on youth who are the most marginalized. This
pattern of differential impact demonstrates that the factors that contribute to resilience,
such as engagement, are contextually sensitive. For youth with the fewest resources,
engagement may influence their life trajectories more than for youth with greater access
to supports. Case material and research that shows the link between resilience and
engagement of youth with adults is discussed as a way to show that resilience is not an
individual quality, but instead a quality of the interaction between individuals and their
environments. The benefits of youth-adult partnerships are realized for marginalized
youth when specific conditions that promote interactions that contribute to resilience are
created.
Keywords: resilience, adult-youth partnerships, marginalized youth, youth engagement
Michael Ungar, Ph.D. is the Killam Professor of Social Work and Co-director of the Resilience
Research Centre at Dalhousie University, 6420 Coburg Road, PO Box 15000, Halifax, Nova
Scotia, Canada, B3H 4R2. E-mail: Michael.ungar@dal.ca

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Tak-Yan emigrated to northern California from China with his mother and stepfather
when he was 3 years old. It was shortly after the family had settled that Tak-Yan’s father was
jailed for a violent crime and his mother began to drink heavily. Tak-Yan was eventually
removed from his mother’s care and spent the next five years in a series of foster and group
homes. Once returned to his mother, he suffered severe emotional neglect and eventually turned
to delinquent peers for support. A night in jail and a six-month probation order when he was 15
caused Tak-Yan to reconsider his life. At about this same time, Tak-Yan was contacted by an
outreach worker from a church-sponsored community organization with strong links to Tak-
Yan’s ethnic community. That worker recognized Tak-Yan’s potential and provided him with
opportunities to participate in community activities, including efforts to support younger children
who were just beginning to get in trouble with the law. The mentorship and the opportunity to
make a real contribution were both attractive to Tak-Yan who quickly changed peer groups.
While Tak-Yan was motivated to change, it was the structure provided by a court order,
coupled with the opportunity for mentorship and recognition from adults that created the
conditions that facilitated a change in his life course. Furthermore, Tak-Yan’s identification with
his outreach worker and realistic opportunities to find a powerful identity as one who helps
others were crucial factors in Tak-Yan’s self-description of his resilience. In Tak-Yan’s case,
there was an easily identifiable set of protective factors that were responsive to the types of
adversity he faced. It is this interaction between an individual child’s risk exposure and
engagement in emancipatory relationships with adults that is the focus of this article.
A Social Ecological Understanding of Resilience
Despite decades of resilience research, there continues to be ambiguity in how to define
and measure positive development in contexts of adversity. Part of the reason is that there has
been confusion describing the difference between a strength or asset that benefits an entire
population regardless of whether risk factors are present, and protective and promotive factors
and processes that respond to specific risks (Wright & Masten; 2006; Ungar, 2012). In the first
instance we talk about strengths contributing to well-being; in the latter we talk about resilience
under conditions of adversity. The distinction can be difficult to make because a strength (e.g.,
the engagement of young people in relationships with adults through transformative
collaborations) may benefit all youth to some degree whether they are at risk or not. This same
strength (engagement with adults) for a child like Tak-Yan, will, however, exert a greater impact
when that child has few other ways to cope with adversity (Abrams & Aguilar, 2005). In this
regard, a strength such as youth engagement can exert a differentially larger impact on the
developmental outcomes of marginalized young people.
The distinction between a strength in one context and a factor that contributes to
resilience in another depends upon (a) the amount of stress the individual is exposed to (higher
levels of stress make the likely impact of engagement even greater), and (b) the amount of
change that can be expected in a child’s life trajectory. Therefore, typical of many factors that
increase resilience, youth engagement is a protective factor against psychological and social

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problems in circumstances where young people experience adversity, but is less influential when
risk is low (Shernoff & Schmidt, 2008).
This pattern of differential impact shows that the factors that contribute to resilience are
contextually sensitive and therefore difficult to identify without assessing the real-world barriers
children experience to psychosocial development (Thomlison, 1997). A social ecological
understanding of resilience is meant to address this problem. Resilience is understood as more
than a set of individual competencies under stress: the higher the level of adversity children
experience, the more they benefit from resources that facilitate successful pro-social forms of
coping such as an empowering relationship with a caring adult. It is the optimal functioning of
the young person’s environment that is the most important factor in deciding children’s
resilience rather than the specific capacities of children themselves (Ungar, 2011b). As Tak-
Yan’s life story shows, without the opportunity to take advantage of a healthy environment, a
child will use maladaptive forms of coping to maintain well-being.
While recent theorizing has suggested that resilience is the interaction between
individuals and their environment, the tendency has been to emphasize that both are equally
influential on developmental outcomes. Herein lies one of the reasons for problems
conceptualizing resilience. In better-resourced environments, individual talents are likely more
influential on developmental outcomes because the child’s personal expression of competency
has many opportunities to be noticed. For less stressed individuals, the person and the
environment may count equally because the environment is rich with resources and the
individual has many different opportunities to succeed. However, when stress is much higher and
risk factors accumulate, the environment is often impoverished. For the child to succeed and
have her talents recognized, her environment must provide an exceptionally effective protective
factor (such as an engaging adult who cares about the child’s success) in order to counteract the
negative effects of a socially toxic home, school, or community. While personal qualities still
matter, they matter much less when they have no special place for expression. In other words,
under conditions of great adversity, it is the quality of the environment that makes it possible for
a child to succeed rather than the child’s talents.
This, then, is why a relational factor such as the engagement of young people with adults
can account for far more of the variance in developmental trajectories among stressed youth than
individual factors. Without the relationship, individual capacity would lie dormant, or manifest
as maladaptive forms of delinquent and disordered behaviour typical of individuals who cope in
dangerous environments (Kurtines et al., 2008). A social ecological interpretation of resilience
provides a way of understanding this complex pattern of influence that families, schools, and
communities have on the processes promoting resilience that children like Tak-Yan use to
survive.
The Importance of Youth-Adult Relationships
In contexts of risk, relationships are crucial to mitigating the negative impact of toxic
environments. Resilience, the capacity to overcome adversity, is facilitated by those who engage
with the child (Masten, 2001; Rutter, 2012). To illustrate, Yates, Egeland, and Sroufe (2003)
showed through their 25-year longitudinal study that it is necessary to appreciate the

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interactional processes that lead to greater resilience during a child’s development. These
processes begin early, they argue:
[T]he successful negotiation of early developmental issues provides a foundation for the
process of resilience among disadvantaged youth. This process originates in early
transactional exchanges between the child and her or his caregiver that scaffold the
child’s developing capacities for adaptive emotion regulation, social engagement, and
positive expectations of the social world and of the self. (pp. 257–258)
These exchanges, however, do not need a strong child to succeed. In the case of children
who have been badly neglected, such as Romanian orphans adopted by well-resourced families
in Britain, it was the sustained capacity of the caregivers and professional supports that created
conditions for even the most vulnerable of these children to achieve developmental gains (Barke,
2006). While one could argue that each orphan had the capacity to grow, the real potential to
stimulate this growth lay dormant while the child was in the orphanage. It was changes to the
environment, not changes to the child, which best accounted for better than expected outcomes.
Engagement, however, is not chosen by the child as a pathway to resilience in all
instances. Instead, as Wyman (2003) has observed, children may accurately appraise their
situations as dangerous and perceive adults as unreliable, resisting their influence. To maintain
their well-being children withdraw emotionally from adults who approach them with offers of
help. This pattern of hidden resilience (Ungar, 2004), or what is wrongly perceived as
maladaptive coping, speaks to the need to understand the complex interactions between children
and their environments.
It is for this reason that resilience can be defined as the individual’s ability to navigate to
resources, as well as the capacity of the individual’s environment to provide resources that
protect the child in ways that are meaningful (Ungar, 2008). Unless the child is empowered to
negotiate for what he needs, the resources that are provided are unlikely to be used (Bottrell,
2009). It is for this reason that adults who engage children in processes that let them be heard
and empowered in the design of their care plans are likely to help children maximize the benefit
of the relationship. As Wyman (2003) explains, “processes that are beneficial to children in one
context may be neutral, or even deleterious, in another” (p. 314). In contexts where children
experience limited access to resources, the provision of a relationship that is transformative and
empowering may successfully counter a negative life trajectory (Lerner & Overton, 2008). In
particular, as Delgado (2006) shows, creating opportunities for youth to become leaders benefits
the disadvantaged child the most.
Caution is required, however, when describing the nature of youth-adult relationships that
contribute to positive developmental outcomes. In a study of 500 middle-class families in the
United States (Jones & Schneider, 2009), it was shown that parents could have a positive
influence on school outcomes when they involved themselves in activities with their children
that were not focused on improving educational performance (weekend camping trips were more
predictive of adolescents’ school performances than reviewing homework assignments with
them). Overly protective parenting that was too controlling of children’s choices was associated
with lower grade point averages among adolescents, while indirect academic pursuits such as

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sharing an activity together, especially those done with a mother, actually had a positive impact
on school performance. Furthermore, the quantity of time parents spent with their adolescent was
not related to school performance either. Instead, it was the quality of the interactions, and the
coaching parents provided youth on life choices, the expectations they conveyed for school
completion, and the undertaking of family activities outside of school that predicted school
achievement. While the sample in the 500-family study was not a population facing extreme
adversity, the findings support the notion that factors that predict positive youth development
involve relationships with caregivers that are matched to children’s needs rather than imposed on
them by adults who think they know best.
Research such as this has shown remarkably similar results to that of a study by Ungar,
Liebenberg, Armstrong, Dudding, and van de Vijver (2013) of 497 multiple service users, all of
whom were children experiencing adversity. In that study, it was not the quantity of services, but
the quality of relationships between a single service provider and youth that was most predictive
of functional outcomes like school engagement. Resilience, as measured by the Child and Youth
Resilience Measure-28 (Ungar & Liebenberg, 2011) was the mediating factor between service
quality and engagement in pro-social activities. Here, youth-adult relationships that were
attentive to the needs of young people, engaged their voice in decisions affecting them,
encouraged negotiation rather than the imposition of pre-selected interventions, and sustained
equal participation when reasonable to do so, were all contributing factors to young people
experiencing benefits from these relationships.
Contextual and Cultural Specificity
The nature of these relationships, however, is contextually and culturally specific.
Patterns of interaction that produce healthy outcomes are best investigated using methods that
encourage the discovery of unnamed processes that contribute to resilience. For example, a study
of positive deviance done by Diaz (2010) of young Latina women who, despite numerous risk
factors for an early pregnancy (e.g., an older boyfriend and a mother who had had a child when
young) were enrolled in university and had avoided pregnancy, found several factors that
predicted their success as outliers among their peers. While it was initially thought that these
girls would have had better access to sexual health education or talked more frequently about sex
with their mothers, in fact neither pattern was observed. Qualitative interviews showed that a
number of communication practices were responsible for the women’s success, almost none of
which related directly to their sexual behaviours. Among the protective practices identified were:
• Parents emphasized the importance of finishing school to their daughters.
• Parents set clear expectations regarding work and home, and in-class and out-of-class
activities in consultation with their children.
• Parents emphasized the benefits of extracurricular activities and having clear goals for the
future.
• Each young woman had the support of a trusted male member of her family or
community who provided affirmation and guidance.
• When talking about a potential pregnancy, mothers emphasized the gains to be achieved
by delaying pregnancy rather than describing pregnancy as a failure.

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It is worth noting that the unconventional practice of talking very little about sex and much more
about school was a contextually specific strategy employed by adults to engage these young
women in their education. Arguably, the youth-adult relationship was strengthened through the
positive focus and future orientation of the interactions.
These examples suggest that youth will engage with adults in constructive patterns of
behaviour that promote well-being when adults offer themselves as resources in ways that young
people value. In this sense, the youth-adult relationship becomes a resource promoting resilience
when it is made available in ways that respect the young person’s negotiations for a level or type
of support that matches her understanding of what she needs.
Facilitating Youth-Adult Partnerships
The benefits of youth-adult partnerships are realized for marginalized youth like Tak-Yan
when conditions are created that promote interactions that contribute to resilience (they help
youth navigate and negotiate more effectively). As Zeldin, Camino, and Mook (2005) explain,
“youth engagement in traditionally adult roles has the potential to maximize youth sense of
community while concurrently ensuring that youth have the opportunity to be active agents in
their own development and to enhance the social organizations in which they live” (p. 122).
Zeldin et al. identify six managerial guidelines that create conditions that promote positive
development among at-risk youth. Adapted to the present focus on resilience and reflecting the
research, the following processes that make youth-adult relationships transformative through
engagement can be identified:
• Gain clarity and consensus on the purpose of including youth in decision-making
processes in their families, schools, and communities.
• Mobilize and coordinate a group of diverse stakeholders so that youth are assured of
advocates who can support them in their choices. In addition to youth as participants,
adult stakeholders are also needed to mobilize support and avoid decisions being ignored.
• Create favourable organizational narratives about the advantages of including youth
voices in decision-making processes. It is important that families, schools, and
communities develop a positive attitude towards youth engagement and document
anecdotal evidence for its effectiveness.
• Construct explanations for why youth should have a say over the decisions that affect
them.
• Affirmatively address issues of role and power while acknowledging the asymmetrical
power between youth and adults. Work to find solutions to balancing this power while
still providing youth with the structure and support they require to make good decisions
within their means.
• Institutionalize new roles for youth and make these the norm through mandated structural
changes to families, schools, and communities.
Each of these strategies positions the adult in a more equal relationship with the youth they are
trying to engage. If successful, the evidence cited earlier suggests that the result will be an
increase in a young person’s social capital and access to the resources that predict resilience
when facing adversity (Ungar, 2011a).

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Conclusion
The value of transformative youth-adult relationships is that they offer the most
vulnerable youth a resource for well-being. When these relationships facilitate access to pro-
social expressions of personal talents, the result is likely to be adaptive behaviour among youth
who face multiple risk factors. In this sense, these young people’s resilience is the result of the
quality of their engagement with adults and not a personal trait. This shift to a social ecological
understanding of resilience avoids blaming young people who resort to maladaptive behaviour to
survive. Instead, we see that it is the ability of their families, schools, and communities to make
relationships with adults available that determines children’s success.

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