A commentary on Ehrlich et al. (2023): a resilience paradox for child development

Paradoxically, resilience carries with it the risk of disorder. When understood systemically, this should come as no surprise. All complex systems demonstrate this same propensity for both positive and negative feedback loops. A thriving ecosystem eventually succumbs to its own dominance over its environment, using up available resources until its survival is threatened and its population declines (e.g. predators like coyotes in a national park where hunting is prohibited) (Ward et al., 2018). For this reason, systems that demonstrate powerful resistance to threat are, paradoxically, often made vulnerable by their success.