Concept
Resilience research first focused on individual children who thrived despite adversity. Family resilience shifts the lens to the family system, treating relationships and interaction as resources for weathering crises. It takes a strengths perspective, looking for and building family strengths instead of cataloguing deficits.
Walsh's key processes
- Belief systems: making meaning of adversity, a positive outlook of hope and perseverance, transcendence and spirituality
- Organisational patterns: flexibility, connectedness, social and economic resources
- Communication and problem solving: clarity, open emotional expression, collaborative problem solving
Walsh stressed that resilience is not a fixed trait but a process that develops over time, and that families recover in diverse ways.
Links to stress theory
McCubbin's Double ABC-X model, extending Hill's ABC-X, and the resiliency model explain adaptation through stressor events, family resources, perceptions and coping.
Practice
Family therapy and family social work use it to assess strengths and strengthen communication and support networks in families facing illness, divorce, bereavement, poverty, disaster or migration, and to view single-parent, multicultural and grandparent-headed families in terms of adaptation rather than deficit.
References
- Walsh, F. (2016). Strengthening Family Resilience (3rd ed.). Guilford Press.
- Walsh, F. (2003). Family resilience: A framework for clinical practice. Family Process, 42(1), 1-18.
- McCubbin, H. I., & McCubbin, M. A. (1988). Typologies of resilient families: Emerging roles of social class and ethnicity. Family Relations, 37(3), 247-254.