Young people today face increasing levels of uncertainty. They’re navigating volatile job and housing markets and contending with a future that’s likely to be significantly marked by the climate crisis. Evidence also indicates that this generation is experiencing a sharp deterioration in mental health. Developing resilience is often hailed as the solution.
Young people today face increasing levels of uncertainty. They’re navigating volatile job and housing markets and contending with a future that’s likely to be significantly marked by the climate crisis. Evidence also indicates that this generation is experiencing a sharp deterioration in mental health. Developing resilience is often hailed as the solution.
Resilience is typically framed as overcoming adversity and this tends to mean conforming to social norms. Staying in school, holding down a job, persevering no matter what. It’s an individual virtue, which places an emphasis on personal responsibility and self-reliance.
But this conventional understanding of what it means to be resilient, and what we expect to see when we ask young people to be resilient, may be overlooking the hidden ways they adapt and survive. It dismisses alternative responses, such as resistance, disengagement or inaction.
By redefining resilience to include different ways of adapting and the importance of support from others, we can create a more practical approach to handling uncertainty.
My research with colleagues has explored the unconventional side of resilience. It is based on interviews with 92 young people across four European countries, as well as further focus group discussions. It was part of a larger a European study of young people facing disadvantage across 10 countries.
To understand the experiences of these young people, we spent time with them in their own spaces. These included youth centers, protest groups and online communities.
We held one-on-one conversations where young people shared their personal experiences, thoughts and struggles. And we worked with them in creative ways, often within workshops or group discussions, so they could help shape the research.
Through this work, we found that actions by young people that might ordinarily be dismissed as failures can actually be hidden, unconventional forms of strength and adaptation in their own right.
