6. Fostering Resilience

Fostering Resilience

Can you think of a time where you were hurt or extremely afraid? What helped you recover? When children are hurt or afraid it takes time for them to recover. Resilience refers to a child’s ability to recover from difficult experiences—to bounce back. Children are naturally resilience, but poverty, violence and catastrophe can prevent children from bouncing back from challenging experiences. Research on resilience has found that vulnerable children who bounce back and succeed all have had:

• A relationship with a caring adult
• High expectations
• Involvement in experiences that demands time and fosters talent
• Opportunities to contribute to society

Creating safe spaces is essential to holistic healing through social support. Safe spaces with caring adults help children recover and foster resilience that will help them be successful in life. Social and cultural networks and practices within communities contribute to resilience of individuals and of the community itself.

• Adults can help foster a child’s resilience by:
• Helping children make connections with other people
• Helping them discover a life purpose through helping others
• Keeping rituals that make them feel safe
• Making sure children follow rules and are disciplined
• Teaching children to be aware of their own needs and feelings
• Helping them discover and express feelings through art making
• Helping children set goals that they can reach
• Teaching children to like and value themselves through consistent identification of their strengths
• Providing opportunities for mastery of art-making processes
• Making sure they understand that change is a part of life

Creative arts experiences can also foster children’s resilience. Arts interventions provide a sense of normalcy, support and encouragement, aesthetic nourishment and a sense of belonging. Art-making allows the child to tap their creative imagination and use this resource for connection, growth, and healing. Creative arts foster healthy communication and expression that can enhance self awareness. Art-making provides opportunities for children to bridge art creation with life events. These arts experiences help children process traumatic events and experience play and joy—all of which foster their resilience to future trauma.

Example: Fostering Resilience of Child Soldiers through Dance

In Sierra Leone, boys and girls as young as six fought as soldiers in a brutal civil war that left child soldiers homeless, orphaned and without access to social and community support. From March to September of 2006, David Alan Harris with the Center for Victims of Torture led a dance program that helped these distressed children process emotional reactions and build their resilience to future difficulties.

Harris began each session with The Name Game, a dance where each child says “My name is_____” while showing an action of their choice and the rest of the group repeats his or her name and mimics the action. The Name Game helped group members bond and affirmed each member individually. Mimicking others’ movements built connections and provided opportunities for members to reflect on their movements and others’ movements. After the group established trust and community, they used dance to reflect on some of their extremely challenging life experiences. For example, in one session, children were asked to sculpt others in their group into images of their family before the war and then after the war. These human sculptures inspired children to talk about what led to the difference in the first and second image of their family. The creative safe space that the dance group created allowed former child soldiers to explore their reactions to life experiences in an emotionally safe environment that fostered their resilience to future challenges.

Harris says that “The arts offer people a chance to symbolize what they have been through even if they can’t articulate it in words. When these kids were creating symbolizations of their experience it was helping them to tolerate what they had been through and to transform themselves through the process of creativity. Creativity is empowering. It gave them the power to begin to feel proud of themselves, cooperate with one another and to know the pleasure of being helpful to one another in a process like that.”

Example: Building Resilience after Terror

On September 11, 2001 two airplanes hit the World Trade Center in New York City, USA killing almost 3,000 people. Children in New York were afraid and anxious after the terrorist attacks. Big Brothers Big Sisters of New York City (BBBS NYC), an NGO, decided to start a mural project to help children and adults heal from their trauma. BBBS NYC worked with local artists to come up with the idea for the project called “Our City, Our Children, Our Pride.” They asked 24 teams of children and their mentors to work together to paint a tile of the mural. The tile gave children and their mentors a chance to express their fear, grief and stress with creativity. Working on the mural helped children develop strong relationships with their mentors. These relationships and healing through art making helped children bounce back from the trauma of the attacks and become more resilient to future trauma.

Experience: Leading Metaphors of Resilience

Goal: Practice using art-as-metaphor to build resilience

Many children are upset by the earthquake that affected Haiti. Some are afraid to go inside and others have trouble sleeping. Create an arts-based metaphor to address a seven year old child’s fears. Use a metaphor that fosters resilience.

Message:

Art Form:

Goal (describe what you would demonstrate)

Connection: (describe how you would make the connection between the art-making process and the life process of overcoming fear)

Questions: (what questions would you ask children to help them make the connection?)

Experience: Leading Metaphors of Resilience

Goal: Practice leading an art-as-metaphor activity

Divide into groups of 3. Each person in your group should lead a metaphor activity while the others in the group participate.

Reflection:

What was the most effective part of the activity you led?

What was the least effective part?

What is the most difficult part of using art-as-metaphor?

Advanced Reading

Fostering Resilience in Children by Bonnie Benard

Fostering Resilience among Children in Difficult Life Circumstances Prepared by Yitzhak Berman