Masten Ordinary Magic
Masten Ordinary Magic
Masten Ordinary Magic
C hap ter 1
Introduction
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robably as long as humans have told stories to one another,
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there have been tales of individuals who overcame difficul-
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ties to succeed in life. Traditional folktales and fairytales
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origins who rise in life through their wits and actions, sometimes
assisted by a guide or magical figure. These traditional stories have
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makes a difference, for whom, and when, providing guidance for
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efforts to improve the chances for healthy development among
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children at risk for problems related to negative life circumstances.
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This premise motivated the scientists who initiated the systematic
study of resilience phenomena in children in the 1960s and 1970s.
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The scientists who pioneered the study of resilience in human
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development were profoundly influenced by World War II. The
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present at the Battle of the Bulge. Emmy Werner was one of the
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2. Why?
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3. What can we do to make the sickness less common?
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It was too expensive in resources to follow the development of a
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general population of children over time to observe who may or
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may not develop problems, particularly in the case of uncommon
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disorders or problems. Risk factors were a way to choose groups
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talk and write about the importance of these questions and their
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observations on positive development among high-risk children
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and youth. These investigators would propagate the first wave of
resilience research.
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Four Waves ofResilienceScience
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Over the past half-century, there have been four major waves of
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do communities and societies nurture resilience? The evidence,
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controversies, and lessons learned from each of these waves to
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date will be examined further throughout this volume.
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The great insight of the early pioneers in resilience science
was in recognizing the potential significance of understand-
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ing positive outcomes among high-risk children and youth for
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practice and policy as well as for scientific theory. They inspired
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with the ultimate goal of tilting the odds toward positive develop-
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people: the evidence and the surprises, the conclusions and the
controversies, the gaps and the future goals, and the implications
OrdinaryMagic
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The biggest surprise that emerged from the study of children who
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luck, or resources, but most of the time, the children who make
it have ordinary human resources and protective factors in their
lives. Resilience emerges from commonplace adaptive systems for
human development, such as a healthy human brain in good work-
ing order; close relationships with competent and caring adults;
committed families; effective schools and communities; oppor-
tunities to succeed; and beliefs in the self, nurtured by positive
interactions with the world. Studies of resilience repeatedly point
to the same factors associated with positive adaptation or develop-
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ment in the context of risk, representing clues to what really mat-
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ters for resilience. These findings highlight the power of human
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and social capital for development and suggest priorities for those
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who aim to shift the odds in favor of good outcomes among chil-
dren threatened by a variety of negative life circumstances.
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The study of resilience has had transformative effects on
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the guiding frameworks for interventions and policies designed
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Coatsworth, 1998).
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role in its history. Resilience science emerged from the same roots
that gave rise to developmental psychopathology, an integrative and
multidisciplinary approach to mental health theory and practice
that emphasizes the full range of individual differences in adap-
tation and development over the lifespan (Cicchetti, 2006, 2010;
Masten, 2006a, 2012a). The study of resilience in children at risk
for mental health problems is one of the core domains of work
under the broad umbrella of developmental psychopathology.
Introduction 9
The word resilience stems from the Latin verb resilire (to rebound).
In colloquial English, the word resiliency retains a similar mean-
ing, referring to the property of elasticity or springing back, much
as a rubber band does after it is stretched and then released. In
engineering science, materials are said to be resilient when they
resist cracking or breaking under stress or return to original form
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after distortion by stress or load. In ecology, resilience refers to
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the capacity of a system to absorb disturbance and reorganize
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and yet persist in a similar state (Gunderson, Folke, & Janssen,
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2006). The conceptual similarity among resilience concepts in
multiple fields likely stems in part from shared origins in gen-
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eral systems theory (von Bertalanffy, 1968). Resilience refers to
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the adaptation and survival of a system after perturbation, often
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threats.
With each wave of research on resilience in children, the
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This book is focused on resilience in individual young people, but
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the concept of resilience can be applied to any dynamic system,
including a family, a school, a community, an organization, an
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economy, or an ecosystem.
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From a general systems theory perspective, resilience does
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not necessarily connote good outcomes from the viewpoint of
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Optimal
D
Adaptive Functioning
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Average
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B
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Maladaptive
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x
Time
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and after time x; (B) recovery following acute, overwhelming trauma at time
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terrifying experiences, and other major blows in life.
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Path C shows a major shift in the quality of adaptation or
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development over time, from poor functioning to good function-
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ing. This normalization pattern is what one hopes to see if rear-
ing conditions or resources substantially improve in the lives of
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individuals living in conditions of extreme deprivation or chronic
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adversity. One of the most dramatic examples in modern times
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improved rearing conditions (e.g., Rutter, 2006; Rutter & the Eng-
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Two Judgments:
TheCriteria forResilience
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quality of adjustment or a persons development (is this person
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doing okay?). People make these judgments all the time in the
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course of daily life and most, when asked, can think of a person
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from their own experience who has manifested resilience.
If there is little or no threat in an individuals life, or if there
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is not (yet) evidence of recovery or good outcome, then there is
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no observed resilience (at least not yet). This sounds obvious and
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Rutter, 2012b).
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andAdaptation
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co-occur. Thus, when one risk factor is measured, there are likely
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to be a number of other unmeasured risk factors that also are
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present. Second, risk factors may reflect underlying processes that
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are so fundamental that they undermine more than one aspect of
adaptation and development. Normal development requires basic
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nutrition; malnutrition can produce a broad array of problems
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in growth, brain development, and cognition (Fiese, Gunderson,
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is likely that one problem leads to another, so that over time, the
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essential tools for attention and impulse control, can have pro-
found consequences for subsequent success at school, interfering
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of parental dating or reconstituted families.
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In the resilience literature, there have been two major
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approaches to the study of cumulative risk. One is focused on tab-
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ulating the number of known risk factors present in a persons life.
The second approach calculates the level of exposure to stress-
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ful events and experience, either by summing negative life events
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in a given time period or otherwise quantifying the severity of
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DevelopmentalTasks, Competence,
andCascades
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norms or expectations grounded in developmental, historical,
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cultural, and/or situational contexts.
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It is not surprising that the absence of symptoms related to
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mental health problems has been popular as a criterion for defin-
ing good adaptation, given that the study of resilience arose from
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efforts to understand and prevent the development of mental ill-
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ness. If children at risk for mental disorders are studied, then it
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for the behavior of children and youth are so widely held among
human societies as to be labeled universal. All societies expect
children to learn to walk and talk and follow the rules of the soci-
ety. Other tasks are common among societies of similar industrial
development or culture. For example, many communities world-
wide expect children to attend school and to learn something use-
ful there. Still, there are developmental tasks that are much more
specific to a given region or cultural group, such as the expecta-
tion to learn weaving or fishing. Also, there are optional develop-
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mental tasks at some periods of life, when individuals in a par-
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ticular society or culture have some leeway to choose alternatives
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(e.g., focus on a job or focus on child rearing).
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Developmental tasks typically include observable achieve-
ments, such as talking or academic achievement, but they also
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may include internal achievements, such as happiness or a sense
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of identity. Erik Erikson (1963, 1968), for example, viewed iden-
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Learning to speak the language of the family
Obeying simple commands
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Learning to play with other children
Emerging: self-control of attention and impulses
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Early school years ui
Attending school and behaving appropriately
Learning to read and write the language of the community
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Adolescence
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Early adulthood
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tasks and this tenet also is central to developmental theories of
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competence and its development. The science on competence in
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development strongly supports this core idea (Heckman, 2006;
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Masten, Burt, et al., 2006; McCormick et al., 2011).
The thesis that how well one does in one developmental task
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domain can spill over to affect other domains of adaptation has
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been examined most broadly in research on developmental cas-
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tive cascades.
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Children or youth who are doing well in all the ways that
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for resilience unless they also had a history of high risk or adver-
sity exposure. By definition, resilience requires evidence of risk as
well as positive adaptation.
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differences between those who made it and those who did not,
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searching for clues to what matters. There are a number of ways
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to do this, but the simplest is to compare people from the same
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background or with the same risk factors who turn out very dif-
ferently. These groups often differ in ways that suggest adaptive
processes at work. lfo
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The characteristics that distinguish resilient from maladap-
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Part III, I describe the short list of factors implicated in resilience
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research and discuss what these factors suggest about the adap-
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tive systems and processes behind resilience. Additional chapters
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in this section further discuss research on resilience from the per-
spective of multiple levels of analysis. One chapter examines the
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emerging neurobiology of resilience. Additional chapters consider
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resilience in relation to three important contexts of development:
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mote resilience in practice and policy and also for future research.
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2010). I give special attention to developmental transitions (e.g.,
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into school, into adolescence, into adulthood), because these are
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crucial windows of vulnerability and opportunity for children at
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risk. I also discuss late bloomers, who shift developmental direc-
tion dramatically in the transition to adulthood.
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The thesis of this book is a simple one: Resilience arises from
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ordinary magic and it is possible to understand where it comes
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from and how to foster it. However, this does not mean that resil-
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ment are highly complex and the worlds in which children grow
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progress. Moreover, there are children who cannot wait for sci-
entists to understand the whole story. The purpose of this book
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