Family and Child Consultants

Resilience. It's become one of those words that sounds unquestionably positive. We celebrate resilient children. We admire resilient families. We fund resilience programs. We write policies about resilience. We train professionals to build resilience. And don't get me wrong—resilience matters. The ability to recover from setbacks, adapt to challenges, and keep moving forward in difficult circumstances is an important life skill. But lately, I've been wondering if we've become a little too comfortable with the word. In fact, I wonder whether we have become so focused on teaching children to be resilient that we've stopped asking why they need to be so resilient in the first place. Because resilience was never meant to be a substitute for safety. It was never meant to excuse dysfunction. And it certainly was never meant to become the solution to systems that continue to fail children. The Child Who Keeps "Bouncing Back" In child protection, education, mental...