The Myth of Resilience – what adults get wrong!

I was listening to a podcast recently when the topic of resilience was discussed. It pricked my ears. I hear a lot of talk about resilience when I’m around educators. More often than not, it’s used damningly: “Young people just don’t have resilience these days.”

It’s a phrase I’ve heard countless times. Perhaps you have too.

But let’s pause and really consider what resilience means. The Oxford definition is: “the ability of people or things to recover quickly after something unpleasant, such as shock, injury, etc.”

The word recover stands out. Recovery suggests a return to something - a state of safety, calm, or happiness after difficulty. In other words, resilience depends on there being a safe place to return to.

Welcome to the problem! For many young people, their “recovery” is anything but safe. It is unpredictable, chaotic, ever-changing, and often traumatic. To expect resilience in these circumstances is to misunderstand the concept entirely. We are, in effect, asking them to bounce back into a space they don’t trust, don’t feel comfortable in, and often associate with fear and anxiety.

Of course, there are young people who may lack resilience in the truest sense of the word. When the scaffolding around them is solid - safe relationships, predictable environments, and accessible recovery - then it is fair to be curious about how they might strengthen their own resilience. But for so many others, the narrative that “they lack resilience” is too simplistic. Too rigid. Too dismissive of the reality some young people are navigating. 

These young people don’t lack resilience. They lack scaffolding. They lack safety. They lack predictability. They lack access to proper recovery.

Our role is not to measure resilience, but to create conditions where it can exist. We must change the narrative. Instead of stripping young people of dignity with easy judgements, we must build the conditions that allow resilience to grow. Safe relationships. Predictable environments. Real recovery. This is the lens we look through. 

Only then can we say, with any integrity, that resilience is possible.