What Makes a Child Resilient?

By Robert Sullivan

David Oriani, today a sophomore at the University of Rhode Island, was a 13-year-old public school seventh-grader when the bullying began. "At first, I tried to brush it off," he remembers. "But it got worse. I got beat up every day and couldn't take it. I'd fake being sick. My grades slipped." David's parents, having learned of his travails, went to school administrators. But the harassment was ceaseless, and David's thoughts darkened: "I felt, 'What did I do to deserve this?' I wanted revenge. I never sat down and planned anything--I personally couldn't pick up a gun and kill someone, it's not who I am--but I will tell you, I did want to hurt them. I wanted them to feel how bad I felt."

David, with the help of his parents and a sympathetic principal at the private school to which he transferred, survived--and slowly rebuilt his self-esteem.

In an age when bullying has had fatal consequences, his tale, while painful, is ultimately a success story. In fact, Oriani could stand as a poster boy for a modern movement that seeks to understand resilience among the young: what it is that allows some kids to negotiate the tunnel to a brighter day, while others get lost or even crash.

Psychological resiliency, a concept first popularized in the early 1970s, focuses on the positive. Its evangelists don't dwell on kids who fail under stress but on those who, against long odds, succeed. "The hallmarks of a resilient child include knowing how to solve problems or knowing that there's an adult to turn to for help," says Robert Brooks, a clinical psychologist on the faculty of Harvard Medical School. "A resilient child has some sense of mastery of his own life, and if he gets frustrated by a mistake, he still feels he can learn from the mistake."

Crusaders for resiliency--and Brooks, co-author of the new book Raising Resilient Children, freely admits he's on a crusade--generally agree on the necessity of a linchpin relationship between the child and at least one parental figure. One of the pillars of the movement, the late Julius Segal, a pioneering psychologist in resiliency research, spoke of a "charismatic adult," a person with whom children "could identify and from whom they gather strength." While the obvious candidate for the role would be a mother or father, Segal noted that in a "surprising number of cases that person turns out to be a teacher." Brooks points out that many of the violent kids in today's headlines glaringly lack such a mentor, either at home or in class. "A common thing among the school shooters is a feeling of isolation," he says. "The more you're isolated, the more impossible life is."

Andy Williams, the shooter last week in Santee, Calif., "was desolate," says Sybil Wolin, a psychologist who runs a website called Project Resilience. "He tried to reach out even to other kids' parents. The effort failed, and his resiliency failed."

Wolin, Brooks and others emphasize that to build resilience in a child does not require the molding of a superkid. What's needed is to find one or two things--what Brooks calls "islands of competence"--at which the child can succeed and thus derive a measure of self-confidence. Barry Plummer, a clinical psychologist on the faculty of Brown University's medical school who, in private practice, works with adolescents, says that grownups should "encourage a kid to master something even if he stinks at school--a sport, music, someplace he can go where he is of value. This can build a pocket of resilience."

Fine. But how? Kids aren't talking to parents; parents are overtaxed if not absent; teachers are depleted by teaching, never mind mentoring. How? "It is a problem," says Wolin. "So far, resiliency has been good at describing a situation but hasn't been very prescriptive."

Asked what he would tell kids in the same situation that he faced, Oriani replied, "Reach out." He was luckier than a lot of kids to find someone he could grasp.

--By Robert Sullivan