Family resilience: a developmental systems framework

TLDR

Family resilience is defined as the family system’s capacity to adapt positively to stress, drawing on diverse resources across relationships, cultures, and developmental contexts. The article outlines a developmental systems framework for family resilience, mapping key recursive and synergistic processes that support adaptation. The framework identifies process elements whose usefulness varies across different stressors, emphasizing transactional interactions within families and with their social environment.

Abstract

This article presents a brief overview of a family resilience conceptual framework, grounded in a multi-level developmental systems orientation. A family systems perspective broadens attention to resources for individual resilience throughout the family network of relationships. The concept of family resilience refers to the family as a functional system, impacted by highly stressful events and social contexts, and in turn, facilitating the positive adaptation of all members and strengthening the family unit. A research-informed map of key processes in family resilience is outlined, highlighting the recursive and synergistic influences of transactional processes within families and with their social environment. Varied process elements may be more or less useful, depending on different adverse situations over time, with a major crisis, trauma, or loss; disruptive transitions; or chronic multi-stress conditions. This perspective is attuned to the diversity of family cultures and structures, their resources and constraints, salient socio-cultural and developmental influences, and the viability of varied pathways in resilience.