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Therapist and family and youth specialist Michael Ungar takes readers inside of a weekly support group for families with difficult children. Using the struggles of the families and his own experiences with a troubled upbringing, Ungar lays out nine strategies for parents to help difficult children grow and flourish

In a time of increasing exposure to personal psychological stress, as well as war, natural disasters, and economic upheaval, positive development under adversity{u2014}resilience{u2014}is meriting wider and deeper study. Despite this attention and over four decades{u2019} worth of robust literature, resilience remains difficult to define and even harder to measure. Taking the view that resilience is a process to be developed and nurtured rather than a hard-wired capacity of the individual, The Social Ecology of Resilience explains how interactions with school, family, community, and culture can provide ingredients for positive development. Case studies representing international and cross-disciplinary perspectives (e.g., Aboriginal youth in Australia, refugees in Sudan, and gay teens in the U.S.) demonstrate resilience across cultures and the lifespan. And interviews with healers and activists who have themselves survived trauma reveal resilience as a set of processes that can be both learned and taught. Featured in the coverage: Causal pathways and how social ecologies influence resilience. Situating resilience in developmental contexts. Fostering recovery, sustainability, and growth in traumatized communities. Resources that promote resilient parenting. Children with disabilities and the supportive school. Indigenous perspectives on resilience. The up-to-date data and real-world viewpoints in The Social Ecology of Resilience will be of great interest to those working with this elusive concept, including social workers, psychologists, students and professors in family relations, and researchers in social policy

Surviving and thriving : what at-risk youth do, and what we can begin to do better -- Understanding youth as three identities : pandas, chameleons, and leopards -- Six strategies to discover hidden strengths -- From truth to action : strategies two through five -- Meaningful substitutions : real options for real resilience -- A new way to look at bullying -- Assessing resilience -- Translating the results of the resilient youth strengths inventory -- Conclusion : the need for change.

<p><span style="font-family: Times New Roman; font-size: small;">Distinguishing between population-wide strengths and processes associated with youth resilience, this paper shows that engaging and transformative youth-adult relationships exert the greatest impact on youth who are the most marginalized. This pattern of differential impact demonstrates that the factors that contribute to resilience, such as engagement, are contextually sensitive. For youth with the fewest resources, engagement may influence their life trajectories more than for youth with greater access to supports. Case material and research that shows the link between resilience and engagement of youth with adults is discussed as a way to show that resilience is not an individual quality, but instead a quality of the interaction between individuals and their environments. The benefits of youth-adult partnerships are realized for marginalized youth when specific conditions that promote interactions that contribute to resilience are created.</span></p>

Publication of The Social Worker: A Novel (Ungar, 2011b) is an example of how fiction can be used to re-present life narratives from qualitative research. Contrasting samples of text from multiple modes of my writing (fiction, trade nonfiction, professional, and academic), I highlight four aspects of the novel that are congruent with qualitative inquiry: (a) fiction challenges writers and readers to shed assumptions by immersing us in the world of the other; (b) fiction exposes that which is not named or too intuitive to be crisply identified, opening possibilities to articulate discursively marginal points of view; (c) fiction makes clear the presence of the narrator; and (d) fiction acknowledges that the reader is actively present, interpreting that which is read. Discussion of each of these four aspects of re-presentation suggests congruence between the goals of qualitative research and the performance of writing fiction. The complex relationship between subjectivity and this performance is explored.