Social and Physical Ecologies for Child Resilience: Wisdom from Asia and Africa

Book excerpt: Since Emmy Werner and her team discovered on the Hawaiian island of Kauai the “invincible” children who fared well despite exposure to significant household risks, there has been proliferating research on child resilience as a positive response to adverse conditions. The past five decades have seen significant advancements in, and diverse approaches to understanding challenges, facilitative factors, and positive outcomes in the resilience process that involve children. Despite existing and continuously emerging modelings and framings, there appears a common understanding that child resilience unfolds through the interactions between individuals and the environments surrounding them. This Research Topic, therefore, takes an ecological approach to child resilience. While ecologies constitute social spaces that nurture child resilience, they can also refer to the “physical” environments surrounding children. There has been robust empirical evidence suggesting resilience is a shared capacity of the individual and the social ecology (e.g., families, schools, and communities), and more recently of the individual and the physical ecology (e.g., the built or natural environment).