A Qualitative Exploration of Everyday Resilience in Kindergarten Children

Much resilience research in young children focuses on high-risk samples with marked adversity despite the broad acknowledgement that all children, regardless of levels of adversity experienced, have opportunities to engage in resilience processes (Avdagic et al., 2018; Ungar, 2019). To advance understanding of “everyday resilience”, the current study explores resilience qualitatively in a convenience sample of kindergarten children who were not selected on basis of a risk factor. Caregivers ( n = 91) answered a phone interview question in which they were asked to; “Describe a time when your child overcame a difficult situation.” Responses to this indirect assessment of resilience were analyzed using conventional content analysis. Although participants were asked to speak about resilience indirectly, responses were largely consistent with well-established conceptualizations of resilience, including the social-ecological framework for resilience. Indeed, caregivers conceptualized childhood resilience as occurring across four main domains: change, peer(s), health, and rule following. In terms of resilience behaviours, caregivers reported a mix of child- and adult-initiated strategies: the most frequently reported child-initiated resilience strategies were seeking adult support and confronting the adversity, and the most common adult-initiated strategies included verbal collaboration with the child regarding the adversity and problem-solving. Findings support the use of indirect measures of resilience to reduce socially desirable responding and capture detailed and nuanced responses. Highlights Adult support was the resilience strategy used most frequently among all sources of daily adversity, reflecting the centrality of adult support to childhood resilience building. Use of the Five-Minute Speech Sample to indirectly enquire about resilience resulted in responses consistent with existing conceptualizations of resilience responses, supporting its use as an alternative to written responses or quantitative measures. Consistent with the social ecological model of resilience, participants described resilience processes occurring in key contexts (e.g. school, home) that should be purposefully designed to facilitate the development of resilience (e.g., introducing new experiences).