The limits of resilience when to persevere when to change and when to quit 1st edition michael ungar
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Title: The limits of resilience : knowing when to persevere, when to change, and when to quit / Michael Ungar, PhD.
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There is a bronze statue in front of the town office of Drayton Valley, a community of 7,000 in western Canada. Four larger-than-life children are posed in a game of tug-of-war. They are dressed simply and look like children from the 1970s, before screen time and processed foods removed the hardiness that comes with being pushed outdoors in the morning and told to come home at dusk.
If you take a moment to look at the statue, you’ll notice that it is a not-so-subtle nod to a time when small communities like Drayton Valley were a tight-knit weave of families, businesses, government services (only when necessary), and faith communities. That idyllic small town on the prairie vibe, however, forgets that over a century ago politicians and police forcibly pushed aside the Indigenous population and then gave the land to settlers who built their community on what was taken. Ironically, those same early sodbusters and loggers had their own lives upended by the discovery of oil fields in the 1950s—lots and lots of subsurface oil and natural gas reserves that were easy to extract with a little ingenuity. Thousands of miles of pipe were quickly laid to connect pumpjacks that have been kneeling down and rising again twenty times a minute, every hour of every day, for seven decades. All that energy lying in the ground beneath farmers’ fields turned a sleepy village into a boomtown.
While oil prices were high, a “get ‘er done” philosophy of life would take hold in Drayton Valley, encouraging people to work sixteen-hour days to accumulate as much money as they could while
the market was hot. The population would expand, along with local government revenues, and new businesses would open. During each boom, more of the small holdings and tractor barns of Drayton Valley’s farmers would give way to suburbs full of vinyl-sided bungalows with new pickups parked outside and garages chock-full of four-wheel recreational vehicles. The town would also become known for oil-patch stereotypes of rampant drug use, fields of trailers housing transient workers, and more liquor stores than places of worship.
When the price of oil slumped, Drayton Valley would change. Boomtowns, by their very nature, are also bust towns. Communities dependent on commodities like oil and gas, metals, fish, or lumber suffer inevitable downturns when prices for those commodities ebb —the money can dry up overnight. All the trailers used by transient workers as housing are suddenly empty. They are parked in a large field by the river. The hotels go vacant. Businesses close. People who have skills migrate to find a paycheck somewhere else. Children are taken out of hockey, which was too expensive a sport for many families. Banks repossess recreational vehicles. Some people resort to living in their motorhomes when their mortgages come due, and their property has depreciated so much that it no longer makes sense to make payments.
I’ve been working with folks in Drayton Valley for years, partnering with them on a multiyear study of how hundreds of young people and their families navigate the rollercoaster ride of economic booms and busts. Together, we’re interested in how residents of Drayton Valley experience resilience, which, by a simple dictionary definition is the ability to withstand or recover quickly from difficulties. It’s actually a little more complicated, but more about that shortly.
When people in Drayton Valley speak about resilience, they tend to cluster into three camps. The first, and loudest, are those who are waiting for the next big boom to return life to what they call normal. They use phrases like “bounce back” and “recovery.” This is common to communities built around resource extraction. For them, resilience is perseverance—hanging on for dear life until prices improve while
resisting economic diversification or anything else that might betray a lack of faith in the oil and gas industry. It’s about families preferring to send one of the spouses out of the community to find work rather than relocating the family as a whole or scaling back household consumption until the “damn government” does something right and gets the price of oil back to where it should be. These folks are no fools. They know commodity prices rise and fall. They also understand that the price of oil has steadily risen for decades and that globally, despite all the rhetoric to the contrary, our reliance on carbon-based energy continues to grow, not shrink.
The second camp is nostalgic for the community that once was. Its members look backward to a time before oil corrupted the town’s streets and despoiled the farms, which were the lifeblood of prairie life. They recall families pulling together to raise barns and weather droughts. To hear them talk, a smaller town with fewer workers would mean far less drinking in the streets or families stressed by one or both parents committed to working long hours. It is a reassuring vision of a bygone day that rests on the three legs of a wobbly stool. In this case, the legs are economic stability, family, and belief in God.
The third group is the anomaly. They are the few who have dared to say out loud the word “diversification.” It’s a pretty brave thing to do. No one, and I mean no one, likes to be told they are becoming obsolete. Not university professors like myself who are confronting artificial intelligence or dock workers whose jobs are threatened by automation. Very few among us welcome change when what we already have is serving us well.
When I first started working with the Drayton Valley Town Council as a consultant, they were shoulder-deep in an economic boom and desperate to shake the stereotype of their nickname “Drunken Valley.” Town council’s solution, one that I found compelling, was to make their town more appealing to families so that transient workers would settle long term in the community and create stability through the boom-and-bust periods. A state-of-theart daycare was opened. New businesses were encouraged, including coffee shops and gyms. Recreational trails were built, and
the town even created some subsidized housing to provide families with affordable apartments. To a large extent, the strategies worked, and the population increased, slowly, with a better mix of young families and retirees investing in real estate.
Unfortunately, that strategy for the community’s survival only served to reinforce the basic premise that Drayton Valley was an oil town waiting for the next boom. Diversification wasn’t a popular concept with those nostalgic for pre-oil times or those certain that an uptick in commodity prices was just around the corner. During meetings with community members, my host, Lola Strand, who works for the Department of Family and Children Services, all but kicked me under the table if I ever mentioned anything related to economic diversification or questioned the long-term sustainability of the community. It’s not that Lola didn’t see the problem the way I did. She just knew her community, from the people squatting in dilapidated mobile homes in the west to families with paid-off mortgages in brick, triple-pane glass McMansions in the east. And she knew that her community wasn’t ready to reconsider its identity, at least not yet.
That was 2013, before the price of oil, as high as US$110 a barrel in 2012, again dropped precipitously. This time the slump lasted many years. By 2016, oil was trading just over US$40. By 2020, the price collapsed below zero, effectively making the town’s resource reserves worthless.
By this time, there was constant chatter in the oil patch, in the media, and in political circles about the impending decarbonization of our economy and how it would affect communities like Drayton Valley that depend on the production and processing of oil and gas. How would people cope when jobs disappeared for both white-collar energy executives and blue-collar workers earning six-figure salaries? If, in five or ten years, most of us are driving Teslas or other electrical vehicles and wind and solar power are generating more of our domestic and industrial electricity, what kind of future awaits people whose lives are rooted in carbon-based energy? In my more pessimistic moments, I imagined millions of displaced workers becoming a politically disenfranchised lot, ready to follow any
ideologue who shouts at them, “I have the answer.” We are already seeing in Drayton Valley and many other towns, just like it a turn away from democracy as people feel displaced by social and economic forces beyond their control. Their solution has become a growing preference for more authoritarian rulers who push conspiracy theories that remain half-truths at best.
Like the rest of us, people in Drayton Valley are attached to their way of doing things. Most of us prefer regimes of repetitive routine over the disruption of having to reinvent ourselves every few years. It’s no wonder that voting patterns are consistent election after election, with so few swing voters. Change is difficult at any time, even when it’s likely for the better. When it promises an uncertain outcome or a probable loss, or it comes not by personal choice but at the direction of others, it can meet powerful resistance. We hate being told what to do. We hate feeling like our lives are at the mercy of external forces, whether markets, politicians, or experts. These are not necessarily bad traits: they can make us independent and entrepreneurial and foster in us a strong sense of personal responsibility. People in Drayton Valley may be a little more stubborn than most, but they are also more willing than most to fix their own mistakes.
It was only when the boom times didn’t return as quickly as everyone had hoped and doubts about the long-term viability of the oil and gas industry became more difficult to ignore that the town seriously began to rethink its notion of resilience, which for almost seventy years had meant toughing it out until prices recovered and oil-patch activity returned.
Lasagna helped. Lola and her staff enticed local businesses, even those that were struggling, to help host community dinners. From a population of 7,000, more than 200 people would show up each month to break bread at a community hall, with student volunteers from the high school dishing out the food. As laborers and business owners rubbed elbows and passed jugs of fruit juice, one sensed the community finding a common identity a little larger than an oil and gas boomtown. There was an obvious commitment by many families to weather the downturn and not leave town, but this time around,
the conversations weren’t entirely focused on waiting for the next boom. There was room to dream of new industries and hope that the children who ran between the tables and gobbled pieces of cake donated by the local grocery store would have a different future in Drayton Valley, one that didn’t have to include pumping oil from the ground.
Over time, a new town council was voted in, and the town’s plan for resilience began to transform. In 2019, I sat with the mayor and several town councilors over lunch. For the first time, we talked about strategies to diversify the economic base of the community. I remember looking across the table at Lola, who sat beaming at the change in mood, evidently proud that her community was no longer fixated on the “all eggs in one basket” approach to planning.
We talked about new ideas like an education center, hemp farming, and retirement villages that encourage people young and old to embrace a simpler, small-town way of life. None of that was likely sufficient to keep the town fully operational. Months later, led by politicians at the provincial level, there was also talk of large-scale investment in marijuana-growing operations (pot was legalized in Canada) and geothermal energy, which relies on boring holes deep into the ground to extract heat. As a community with expertise in both farming and laying pipe, these bigger ideas seemed to find a solid anchor in the minds of those with decision-making power. There are even plans to create what have come to be known as naturally occurring retirement communities that depend on social cohesion and livable environments for seniors.
It is still a long road ahead, but evidence is accumulating that Drayton Valley is pulling together as a community, determined to reinvent itself. New factories are rising on the edge of the industrial park where drilling equipment and tanker trucks once sat idle. Schools are still at 80 percent capacity. Many young families have chosen to stay, even if one spouse is working in the high artic three weeks out of every six. With economic change have also come changes to how families go about their business. Participants in our study told us they experienced more time with family, and women felt they were treated more fairly as their work outside the home
came to be more valued by their male spouses. There are reasons for optimism.
If one looks closely, this small Canadian town has something profound to teach us about resilience after a crisis, whether that’s a pandemic, a recession, or a more personal disruption such as job loss, a divorce, or an illness or death in the family. Drayton Valley’s story demonstrates how we tend to misunderstand the concept of resilience. Too often, we mistake resilience for recovery—the return of things to some kind of normal, some previous range of behavior, regardless of whether or not it is good for us or whether or not it is sustainable. We recover and leave ourselves entrenched in our pasts, ignoring our potential for what we can become. In this sense, paradoxically, recovery can be just another word for failure.
As a resilience scientist, I shudder when I hear the word “recovery.” It is the least desirable form of resilience and yet the most common description of change in our lexicon of crisis management. To my mind, recovery is a cynical approach to life. It’s more appropriate for the meticulous restoration work of art historians removing layers of soot from seventeenth-century church frescos than communities like New Orleans and Fort McMurray that have experienced catastrophic destruction related to the climate emergency but rebuilt in the same place with the same exposure to future environmental risks. Recovery is just as undesirable for people. Little wonder that so many individuals who experience an addiction and manage to stop their pattern of abuse soon relapse. Recovery typically puts people back into the same spaces and places that made their addiction a reasonable way of coping. When our lives remain intractably the same with all the same stressors, disadvantages, and dangerous social networks that contributed to addictive behavior in the first place, bouncing back shouldn’t be our goal. Bouncing forward, maybe, but even then I’ve learned from my clinical work that to bounce forward we need both personal transformation and a change to the world around us to make it possible for us to become someone new.
Real change in Drayton Valley began when its leadership stopped focusing on recovery and began asking itself if it might not be better
off as a post-oil-and-gas community. It had to confront the fact that a way of life that had sustained the community for generations might no longer be sustainable or desirable. That’s not an easy thing to do when that way of life, despite its ups and downs, has been good to many people. No doubt, to some townsfolk, economic transformation feels like the opposite of resilience. It feels like giving up. Defeatism. Quitting. But it is an exceedingly narrow and unhelpful notion of resilience that keeps pulling us back to an increasingly unviable status quo over and over again. With each visit back to previous but no longer attainable or sustainable success, we dig our future graves. It is only by letting go of those earlier visions and making the necessary adjustments in our mindsets, lives, and communities to let failure happen that a better path can unfold ahead of us.
Generations ago, when the original resilience researchers developed their theories as to why some people coped exceptionally well under stress, resilience looked remarkably similar everywhere. Children were characterized as resilient if they performed in socially desirable ways, such as attending school and continuing on with postsecondary education. Positive development was conflated with self-regulation under stress, with children who could sit on their hands and resist temptation—they were thought to be universally better prepared for life than the unruly, impulsive ones. Children with bad beginnings who avoided teenage pregnancy, married well, held jobs, and were never violent at home or in their communities were similarly held up as products of successful development.
There was no room in these typologies of inspiring, resilient individuals for those less compliant with social norms, however inspiring their stories of strength and resistance. How do we account for the civil disobedience of a Martin Luther King or the revolutionary politics of a Nelson Mandela? The old way of looking at resilience was also dismissive of the experience of the everyday heroes who
had children young, or left school early, or were the class clowns, but went on to make genuine contributions to their families and communities. I’ve met a fourteen-year-old urban drug dealer who fails all the earlier tests of resilience yet is in many ways an impressive young man, the only breadwinner in his family—he was even paying for his younger sister’s dance lessons. I’ve met welders with a diagnosis of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder who could never sit still long enough in class to learn algebra but who have a knack for using their hands to figure out the geometry of the projects they build. I’ve met successful musicians who were daydreamers who underperformed in school and lived reckless, feckless lives as young adults, only to use their troubles and mistakes as inspiration for the lyrics to their music. There are plenty of obviously resilient people out there who don’t meet the traditional definitions of resilience, even though the world needs their resistance to the norms that everyone else accepts.
Over time, our understanding of resilience has broadened to accommodate these non-traditional paths through challenging times. We need to go further, however. We still tend to view resilience in terms of individual cases. A business shows resilience when it invests in practices that retain its workforce during economic downturns. A government shows resilience when it puts in place procedures to ensure fair elections and equitable taxation. A parent nurtures resilience by permitting a child a manageable amount of danger so she can build the skills necessary to cope with future challenges and make good, healthy decisions for herself. Each instance describes a person or an organization able to maintain functionality during and after the experience of an unusual amount of stress. It is positive and growth oriented but blinkered.
It helps to think of the world in terms of complex networks of systems. You yourself are a system, consisting of many sub-systems. You have a system of thought, a system of emotions, an immune system, a structural system of muscles and bones, all of which need to work in concert to keep you healthy, happy, and engaged in the world. You interact with your family (another system), and your community (yet another), and your workplace (another still). In turn,
the business or institution you work for interacts with other businesses and institutions, as well as systems of government, the political system, our economic system. On it goes. Our world is a network of these interlocking systems. Most of the systems share the capacity to right themselves when they get knocked down (although that doesn’t always happen). Most systems have the potential to anticipate, adapt, and reorganize themselves under conditions of adversity in ways that promote and sustain their successful functioning.
The capacity for resilience is not inherent in the system itself. We misspeak when we say, “I am resilient” or “That business is resilient.” No human system is infallibly resilient. Resilience is in the doing. It is the result of one challenged system’s interactions with other systems as it struggles to function during and after a disturbance. A better way to talk about the experience of resilience is to say, “I show resilience” or “my business shows resilience.” The words indicate that a system has been able to engage in the patterns of thinking and behavior that make it possible to achieve desirable ends in difficult times.
Under conditions of atypical stress, resilience is never the goal, in and of itself. I don’t strive to be resilient after a car accident. I do whatever I can to get through the ordeal. That begins with the system in my own head. I need to keep myself calm in order to get the help I need. If my car accident has shaken my confidence as a driver, I need strategies to work through the inevitable questions: Was it really my fault? Is someone else to blame? What could I have done differently? And if my anxiety persists, I might need mindfulness exercises or support from family and friends, or I might need to bring on a professional as part of my resilience plan. In other words, I need to marshal the systems required to get my head right.
I will probably need systems outside myself to get myself back on the road when I’m ready. If it was a serious accident, there was probably a police report, so our system of law enforcement might have been alerted. If there were injuries, our emergency response and healthcare systems may have been involved. I will likely need an
insurance adjuster, yet another institutional system, and hopefully I’ll have an agent who is empathetic toward my situation when appraising the value of the vehicle that I damaged. I’ll either require an auto repair expert and his network of parts suppliers and painters (a commercial system) to get my vehicle back on the road, or, if it’s a write-off, I’ll need a dealer (a different commercial system) to find a replacement. In the meantime, I’ll need help from my family or relational system to get rides to work for a week or two.
When one considers all the systems involved in helping me through the difficulty of my serious car accident, it’s a bit naïve and self-important of me to say, “I had a car accident and am resilient.” There are so many other people and systems involved and so many other resources that need to work in unison if I’m going to put my life back together and overcome misfortune.
Resilience, then, is a process that tests our coping strategies against a significant adversity, and it is something we accomplish in conjunction with other systems. When we talk about protecting ourselves and finding the resources we need to prevail, we are inevitably reflecting both our individual ruggedness and our access to the many different material, psychological, social, institutional, and environmental support systems required for us to cope during times of stress.
Another reality of resilience that we need to appreciate more fully is that it occurs over time. In fact, research has shown that resilience tends to be unstable over time. Think of the frontline workers in long-term care facilities who had the responsibility of keeping elderly residents healthy during the pandemic. We heard stories of incredible acts of self-sacrifice on their part. It would be correct to describe those personal care workers as showing resilience, marshalling the supports they needed, and using psychological tools such as reminding themselves of the importance of their work to endure in difficult situations. They worked long hours and were constantly confronted with new work regimes related to masking and infection control, not to mention the emotional pain of watching residents die or suffer the slow deterioration that comes with long periods of social isolation in their
rooms. All of these experiences took a tremendous toll on the mental and physical health of the staff in these facilities. Their resilience was real but impermanent. Many workers coped through the crisis, but when the worst had passed, they had nothing left to give. Some required long periods of stress leave. As a group, they should expect to experience higher rates of cardiovascular disease and post-traumatic stress disorders unless they receive interventions to interrupt these outcomes.
Sometimes, resilience is a light cloak over a storm of emotions that are just waiting to show themselves. Resilience can get us through a tough moment, yet actually increase our vulnerability after the crisis has passed.
Because resilience depends on multiple systems influencing one another, and because the systems and their interactions change over time, there are inevitably trade-offs. Resilience at one moment in time may compromise a system’s resilience later on. Some systems will benefit more from change than others. In fact, the resilience of one system may undermine the resilience of another. These can be materially unequal processes.
Take, for instance, an urban neighborhood that’s gentrifying, sprouting new businesses and residences, and becoming more livable. Some might describe such a community as experiencing resilience. The process of gentrification may increase the municipality’s tax base and provide funds for public transit and recreational centers. That’s great for the gentry, but what about everyone else? The more vulnerable people in the neighborhood may find that there’s no longer a place for them in it. Longtime residents who were quite comfortable in the community before rents and property values started to rise will find their household finances eroded. They may be forced into substandard housing or subjected to long commutes. If displaced, they will have lost the social capital they had in their old, familiar haunts. From the perspective of the less fortunate, resilience can look a lot like Darwin’s theory of the survival of the fittest. The needs of the weaker members of the species are dismissed—they’re written off as undesirables, expected to fail. Judging resilience only by the benefits accruing to a
community’s more successful members is too narrow an approach to the science of positive development. It doesn’t account for diversity. It ignores the effects of change on the population as a whole.
Scholars of resilience are now examining these unequal processes, with particular attention to the consequences of one system’s success on its future prospects and on other systems that it interacts with. They’re asking an uncomfortable question, “Is there a cost to being resilient?”
The answer is an emphatic yes.
It turns out we’ve been so focused on making our individual selves, our families, our businesses, our economies, and our political systems resilient for when bad things happen that we’ve overlooked the subtle and not-so-subtle consequences of a single-minded insistence on showing strength and endurance. We tend to overlook the reality that the power of one person or system to persist under adversity can come at a cost. This is the resilience paradox. A system can cope well with adversity for a period of time, only to find that its success is an impediment to its future functioning and sustainability, or the functioning and sustainability of another system.
That there are many different ways that resilience can affect us, positive and negative, doesn’t undermine the usefulness of resilience as a concept and a goal. The experience of resilience will always bring periods of exciting growth. We just need to remember that it is never cost-neutral, it never happens in a vacuum, and it never lasts forever. We need to always be looking beyond individual, near-term episodes of resilience to see who is genuinely benefitting from them. We need to be mindful that success might be short-lived and that it may create new vulnerabilities for those enjoying it or from others affected by it. As with so many other things in life, we have to get the balance right. We want resilience, but resilience that endures for the most systems and for the longest possible amount of time.
The people of Drayton Valley in recent years have been thinking about resilience in a more comprehensive, long-term manner. Real change for the townspeople began when the leadership stopped focusing on oil price recovery and began anticipating a post-oil-and-
gas community. That required multiple systems to change at the same time. It required hard-headed business thinking about the limits of the carbon economy. It required the political will to explore and offer financial incentives to new industries. It required individual residents to re-imagine their community’s future and their roles in it. It meant the whole of Drayton Valley had to overcome a dependency on a single industry and nostalgia for an unsustainable way of life. If all of the individuals and institutions in Drayton Valley considered themselves closed systems, unaffected by each other now and in the future, there would have been no moving forward. Openness is the key to dealing with the paradox of resilience— recognizing that we have the ability to make not only ourselves but also other systems stronger or weaker and that other systems can have the same effect on us. We are interdependent, and we all influence how one another adapts to stress. Accepting that interdependence, thinking about the trade-offs among systems over time, permits us to create a more substantive and enduring resilience for all.
Chapter 2 Your Strength Makes Me Weak
The study of resilience teaches that we need to not only focus on the remediation of problems but also build the capacities that make it more likely that more people and communities succeed.
While there are many paths to resilience, some are more common than others. In 2018, I was asked to help Unilever launch a corporate social responsibility campaign to address social anxiety and help young people become their best, boldest selves. I was more than willing to assume that social anxiety was bad and boldness good. Excessive pressures to perform academically and the crushing expectations to be liked on social media have contributed to a spike in depression and anxiety among our youth. Many drop out of society altogether or wind up in our emergency rooms, threatening self-harm and suicide. The science of resilience can shine a light on the critical personal and social resources that young people need to overcome these pressures, like a positive mindset and an adult who mirrors back to them messages of self-worth. But the origins of resilience are never found in a single storyline.
Which personal characteristics are most important to resilience changes depending on context and culture. When we impose one set of resilience-promoting strategies on everyone in our workplaces, schools, families, and communities, the result will be far fewer success stories and persistently high rates of mental and physical disorder. In practice, that means understanding that when a young
person in the United States talks about social anxiety, they most likely mean a feeling of personal shame when asked to perform in front of others. For them, anxiety is rooted in feeling personally uncomfortable. This is not necessarily the case for a young adult in Vietnam, China, or Indonesia, where social anxiety is more likely to stem from feeling that one’s personal failings make others feel embarrassed or uncomfortable. Anxiety is caused by the perception that what one does makes those we are close to feel uncomfortable or lose face.
Obviously, improving the resilience of individuals in these different contexts demands a different set of messages. To the American, the message is, “You are competent and capable.” To the Indonesian, the message is more likely to be, “Others see you as competent and value your contribution.”
The concept of resilience is likely to fail as a framework for a marketing campaign if one forgets that resilience is sensitive to context and culture. We need to look both inward at the changes we are supposed to make in response to stress and outward at the conditions surrounding us. After all, what’s outside us determines what kind of personal adaptation is going to work.
We too frequently forget to consider the environment when we talk about resilience. Studies of children struggling in foster care, for instance, promote mindfulness and positivity. There’s nothing inherently wrong with mindfulness and positivity, but what if they dissuade children in difficult situations from challenging the structures that make their lives hell in the first place? Mindfulness and positivity only get you so far in an external environment that might be characterized by racism, a lack of funding, and other forms of social injustice. And yet resilience has historically been measured not by the degree to which the systems around an individual transform but by how well the individual adapts to a socially toxic world.
That doesn’t seem right to me. Having worked in child welfare systems, I can attest to the reluctance of administrators and courts to admit that sometimes their cure for child abuse is worse than the disease. There is far too much evidence that trying to make children
more resilient by taking them away from their families runs the risk of producing a more vulnerable child disconnected from their culture, identity, and support network. It doesn’t always go that way, but out-of-home placements fail often enough (and put far too many children at risk of homelessness) to make us wonder why we don’t think about the dark side of resilience more often. Thankfully, blind adherence to a narrow view of resilience is becoming less common. Child welfare systems are beginning to acknowledge that a young person’s resilience is only as robust as the resilience of the systems designed to help them. This has meant that incredible stories of change are becoming more commonplace.
One of those stories is the advocacy work of Dr. Cindy Blackstock. A few years ago, Blackstock was put on a terrorist watch list by the Canadian government because she dared challenge the way on-reserve health and social services were being delivered to Indigenous children. The federal government’s badly under-funded system left children living on reserves shortchanged thousands of dollars that could have improved their housing, foster placement, education, and access to mental health supports. The numbers weren’t debatable. Children who received services on-reserve were quite literally unable to get the same level of care as non-Indigenous children living in communities often within their sight. The result was a lack of treatment for children traumatized by abuse and a failure to put in place the supports families needed for reunification. Knowing that the situation was oppressive, Blackstock, a social worker by training, made it her mission to right the wrong. But the more nonviolent protests she led, the more people she mobilized, and the more court cases she won, the more the government of the day searched for ways to silence her. Without ever promoting violence or committing a crime, she was called a terrorist.
In 2021, Blackstock was vindicated. She won yet another lawsuit against the federal government, which had indeed shirked its responsibility to provide adequate funding for child welfare services for Indigenous children. In response to both a Canadian Human Rights Tribunal case and separate class-action lawsuits, the government conceded it had lost and did not appeal the decision,
nor has it blocked the proposed settlement of over C$23 billion in compensation to the thousands of children who were removed from their homes.
The lesson here is that when a so-called system of care lacks accountability, it may be administratively sustainable and even resilient, but that doesn’t mean it’s doing what it was intended to do. A system’s apparent resistance to change can be nothing more than a mask obscuring inept or racist bureaucracies. This terrible downside to resilience is not just found among social service workers and government bureaucrats. Entrepreneurs, educators, tax accountants, and nutritionists risk the same problem when they become stuck in patterns they are told are working despite evidence to the contrary.
It’s great to see different researchers in different fields beginning to question a one-size-fits-all approach to resilience and challenging the rhetoric we hear from motivational coaches and meditation gurus—if only pitches like “resilience, guaranteed, in five easy steps” could deliver what they promise. The goal should be realistic: to think about resilience as something that implicates many different systems and produces a range of outcomes associated with positive growth amid adversity. That some outcomes are not desirable—that promised solutions to life’s challenges have the potential to result in as much harm as good—does not make resilience false or ambiguous. It simply says that resilience is more complicated than perhaps we wanted to believe.
There are new patterns emerging in resilience research, with some cautioning us that what we understand as resilience may be a delusional state. We congratulate ourselves for our personal or collective success while paying no mind to the short-term and longterm problems we are causing. It’s like an entrepreneur saying, “Yeah! My business is back on its feet,” and then confiding, “but I’m in debt up to my eyeballs and my husband left me because all I’ve
done for months is obsess over my reopening.” That’s the problem with success. It can overshadow what’s going on behind the scenes.
Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale is a chilling example of the social and political trade-offs of resilience. It is a dystopian novel that imagines a future in which fundamentalist Christians have taken control of the government. Soul-crushing, ideological violence ensues. Not that the fundamentalist Christians in Atwood’s novel see it that way. They are simply making the world a better, more disciplined place and following God’s plan. Unfortunately, the resilience of those in power comes at the cost of everyone else’s freedom to find their own path to God (or love, or health, or just about anything else that they might want). If that sounds way too pessimistic, one has only to look at the religious states that already exist, whether with codified religious practices like Saudi Arabia and Iran or even countries less obviously theocratic. A set of ultraconservative beliefs in Uganda has created a culture of intolerance toward gender and sexual diversity. In parts of the United States, religious majorities are banning books, making women’s health care illegal and legislating away diversity. Where the zealot sees resilience (my country is blessed by God) and the rise of perfect order, everyone else is left to experience ideological claustrophobia. In such environments, growth and human development, the preconditions for resilience, cannot flourish.
Trade-offs needn’t always be dire. Sometimes, they can border on the ridiculous. A friend of mine lives in an architecturally stunning home with a designer kitchen and vaulted ceilings with skylights that draw light into every room, even during dark winter days. Heating systems are designed with fail-safe accuracy to ensure the ambient temperature is constant in winter and summer. There is a backup generator and a monitor on the propane tanks to ensure a continuous supply of energy. The house is artistically and technically beautiful, but there were trade-offs.
The architect who designed the home at times favored aesthetics over function. The problem is most obvious in the transition from the kitchen to the dining room, where there is a single step down in elevation, followed by another step down into the living room. The
effect is dramatic, with the ceiling height moving from the 8-foot intimacy of the kitchen to high ceilings suspended above a two-story stone chimney rising from the living-room fireplace. Those single steps are an ankle buster. The family living there constantly curses this aspect of the design. It’s a daily annoyance—everyone is always on the lookout for that dangerous elevation drop.
The same lack of functionality can be found in the kitchen, where the architect pushed for sleek, flat-panel cabinetry that hides the appliances. There are no upper cabinets to clutter the sight lines. All of this means surprisingly little cupboard space for cooking supplies or dishes. When the couple that owns the house was in the design phase, the architect asked them if they were going to use the kitchen to cook. They said yes, but the final result leans more toward the minimalism of people who live on Uber Eats.
To be fair, my friend’s home is a soothing blend of spatial properties and textures that stimulate calm and awe every time I enter the space. Those emotional experiences, however, come at a cost for those residing there. Some elements of the home function poorly and require awkward adaptations, such as putting colored tape on the floor to visually mark the steps down into the dining and living areas and buying sets of glasses and dishes that will fit in the drawers of the island where they must be stored.
These are hardly life-and-death problems (though they could contribute to a terrible fall). Still, they hint at something much more important when it comes to thinking about resilience. The capacity of any single system to function well is intricately tied to the way other systems do what they are intended to do.
Every project seeks quality (as defined by that system’s norms) and sustainability (the durability to withstand shocks and either adapt or transform). There is tension when the traits meet. The strength of one system must come at the cost of the other. Hence the need for trade-offs. In architecture, the trade-offs might be between function and form, aesthetics versus efficiency, warmth versus style. We all might choose to draw the lines differently. My spouse loves to dress stylishly and is forever shivering in our Canadian winter; I am happy to clump around in clothing
appropriate for a polar expedition. Despite our differences, I love her for her perseverance and chic aesthetic. Discussion of these compromises should characterize all discussions of resilience, but they seldom do. Instead, we get trapped in myopia. We focus on a single system’s capacity to excel (my winter clothing is warm) while overlooking attributes that other systems might consider excellent (I think my spouse would prefer I not look like the Michelin Man when we go out together in winter, but on this point we’ve agreed to disagree).
A more serious illustration of trade-offs is found in school closures during the COVID-19 pandemic. Did the efforts of public health officials to control infections undermine the resilience of our children? Depending on which studies you read, depressive symptoms among children rose 50 percent to 100 percent in 2020, the first months of the pandemic. Anxiety nudged upward in the same direction. By 2022, those numbers were climbing still further. To what extent did our efforts to protect the vulnerability of adults and, more specifically, unvaccinated adults who might have overwhelmed our medical system (90 percent of patients hospitalized for COVID-19 were unvaccinated) come at a cost to children? Improving the resilience of our public health response as a whole may have made a co-occurring system, children’s psychological, social, and physical development, less resilient. The example begs the question, “Whose resilience matters most?” And who gets to decide if the trade-off is worth it?
It should have come as no surprise that reducing adult hospitalizations was a higher priority for politicians than children’s education. Children are a largely voiceless minority when it comes to social policy (they don’t vote). For all practical purposes, they have little legal standing. Nor do they have the resources to advocate for their needs. On rare occasions, they are given a national stage, like the students from Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, who started a national campaign to end school shootings after seventeen of their classmates were killed in 2018. Greta Thunberg’s climate activism began an international movement among students who went on strike once a week to protest political
inaction on the climate crisis. But these are exceptions. The resilience of young people generally depends on the goodwill of caregivers and the effectiveness of the social and political systems intended to nurture and protect them.
The closing of schools, social distancing in the classroom, and the shutting down of extracurricular activities all made good sense in 2020 when an unknown virus was killing people at an initial rate of one in 300 infected. We risked losing an entire generation of the elderly—our grandparents, colleagues, and friends. By 2021, however, our collective resilience was showing. We had efficiently developed vaccines by cutting down on the red tape and long delays typical of scientific review panels. We lit a fire under sloth-like bureaucrats so that phased trials could proceed as quickly as possible. While there was plenty of good that came from those changes, it was also a setup for failure.
The idea of taking the vaccine became politicized. When that happened, we broke the social contract with our children. We left them paying the price for our selfishness. By the summer of 2021, we were effectively saying that we would continue to sacrifice the well-being of all of our children because a small but not insignificant minority of adults declined to participate in a public health measure to stop an international pandemic.
Our children’s resilience, during the pandemic, required the resilience of other nested systems. We create a virtuouscyclewhen one resilient system becomes a catalyst for the resilience of another. That is the best-case scenario. Alternatively, we create a vicious cyclewhen we let the resilience of one system make other systems worse off than they need to be. It comes down to a set of values. In the case of our children’s right to an education versus the right of unvaccinated adults to unrestricted health care, the values underpinning decisions are easy to see, even if hotly contested.
There were adults who argued that they had the right to remain unvaccinated or that they were healthy and that the pandemic posed no serious threat to them. They insisted that their own biological susceptibility to disease, their nutrition, or some exercise regime made them special and therefore not part of a broader social
contract to help others who were more vulnerable. Or perhaps they were vaccine hesitant because of religious beliefs or because of a pre-existing medical condition. Whatever the case, they were arguing that their individual resilience depended on a set of personally responsive biological, social, and political systems. In my world, we refer to this as resiliencesilos. The resilience of any single system (like unvaccinated adults) supposes itself superior to other vulnerable systems and assumes it can survive alone.
The arguments of the unvaccinated would have been perfectly acceptable ifhealthcare systems had had some way of letting these people become infected without jeopardizing the sustainability of the healthcare system and without restricting the free movement of children. The trade-off was that the right of a few selfish individuals to cope with the pandemic in their own way came at the price of mass restrictions on everyone else. It is not too simplistic to say that if everyone who had access to the vaccines in 2021 took them, the pandemic would have been over much sooner in high-income countries. Instead, our response to the pandemic became a garbled mess of misinformation and political posturing, with children’s lives upended far longer than was necessary. The anti-vaxxers created a functional and sustainable pathway to personal resilience but compromised the resilience of others and the systems they depended upon.
All of this begs the question, “When is one system’s resilience too strong?” When does the capacity of a single actor to decide how they will cope with stress result in the diminished capacity of others to function optimally?
It is a critical question in examining the trade-offs that resilience demands. Deep in the middle of the pandemic, a coalition of organizations concerned with children’s well-being came together to raise an alarm. Just as hospitals announce Code Blue when there is a medical emergency such as a cardiac arrest, Children First Canada
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