Last year, I was in a conference audience when a young woman on the panel said something I haven't been able to shake. She spoke about her own childhood and said she had come to hate being called resilient.
She wasn't saying she wasn't resilient, and she wasn't short on pride about how far she had come. Her point was sharper than that. She felt she should never have had to be resilient in the first place. The strength everyone kept praising was strength she had been forced to grow, because the people and systems meant to protect her had not. To her, being called resilient felt like being congratulated for surviving something that should never have happened. The word named her strength and quietly excused the failure that made it necessary.
I think she was right, and it has changed how I use the word.
I have spent a lot of time around young people who, by any measure, have coped with more than they should have. The longer I do this work, the less certain I am that "coping" is the thing we should be celebrating. A great deal of what gets called resilience is closer to endurance, a young person absorbing what comes and not complaining, and that kind of endurance can carry costs that do not always show up straight away.
So it is worth slowing down and asking what resilience actually is, and where it really comes from. The popular version, the one baked into a lot of how we raise and teach young people, gets it close to backwards.
A familiar belief runs something like this. Life is hard, and the world does not care about your feelings. The kindest thing you can do for a young person is to prepare them for that by not softening it too much. Let them face difficulty, let them fail, let them cop some of the hardness early, because that is what will make them strong enough to handle it later.
You hear it in ordinary phrases. "It'll build character", "a bit of struggle never hurt anyone", "toughen up", or the one that really grinds my gears, "back in my day".
It is not entirely a bad idea, because something real is underneath it: young people do need to face difficulty. Removing every challenge from their path gives them little opportunity to practise coping with one. The problem is not the instinct that challenge matters. The problem is the belief that hardship by itself does the building; it doesn't.
When you look at the young people who grow up with the odds stacked against them and still do well, a clear pattern shows up, and it is not the one the tough-it-out story predicts.
Emmy Werner and Ruth Smith spent more than thirty years following a group of children on the Hawaiian island of Kauai, many of them growing up with poverty, instability, and difficulty at home. A good number did struggle. What stood out were the ones who did not, the children who came through and built decent lives. They weren't marked by some rare inner hardness. Protective factors tended to cluster. Personal competencies mattered, and so did wider community support, but relationships repeatedly appeared in the picture. Many had at least one steady, caring adult who was reliably in their corner, whether a parent, relative, teacher or someone else beyond the immediate family.
Ann Masten, who has studied resilience for decades, arrived at something similar and gave the idea a name I like. She describes the processes behind resilience as "ordinary magic". Ordinary, because it does not depend on extraordinary qualities held by a lucky few. It grows from the everyday adaptive systems that hold a young person up: caring relationships and capable caregiving, the slow development of self-regulation, effective schools and communities, and chances to build competence. The only magic is that these ordinary things do so much.
Read enough of this work and the takeaway is almost the reverse of the folk wisdom. Resilience is not mostly what is left over once you strip the support away. It grows, in large part, from the support and the ordinary systems around a young person. Relationships are a big part of that story; they are not the whole of it.
The young woman at that conference was not rejecting resilience. She was rejecting what the word let the adults around her avoid.
Resilience, understood the way we have been describing it, tells us something about a young person's circumstances as well as their strengths. When we call a young person extraordinarily resilient, we should also be asking what required that resilience from them in the first place. The strength is real; but praising it should not stop us from asking what demanded that strength, what could have been prevented, and whether the adults and systems around them carried enough of the load.
None of this means wrapping young people in cotton wool. Protecting them from every manageable difficulty can also deny them opportunities to learn that they can face something hard and get through it. Challenge is not the enemy here.
The point is subtler, and it lives in the difference between two situations that look similar from a distance.
In the first, a young person faces something difficult with support in reach. They struggle, they wobble, and someone is there, not to lift the challenge away, but to make it survivable. They can come out the other side having learned something specific and valuable. I can struggle and be okay; that lesson is part of the raw material of resilience.
In the second, a young person faces the same difficulty alone. No one is there, or no one they trust. They might get through it, plenty do, but sometimes the lesson is different. Not "I can struggle and be okay", but "no one is coming, so I had better not need anyone". That can look like resilience from the outside. Sometimes, though, it is something else: self-reliance built around the belief that depending on other people is unsafe. That adaptation can carry costs later, including difficulty trusting other people or asking for help when they genuinely need it.
From a distance, the challenge can look the same. One of the biggest differences is whether support was within reach while they faced it.
This is why I have grown cautious about the young person everyone describes as resilient.
Sometimes the label is accurate. Sometimes, though, the young person we are praising for coping so well is quietly carrying far more than we realise, particularly if they have learned that showing struggle does not reliably bring support. Sometimes they have gone quiet because quiet is what worked. We reward it, because a young person who asks for nothing is easy to overlook when there are louder problems in the room.
Healthy resilience does not mean needing nothing. Part of it can be knowing when to reach for support, being able to use it, and then returning to the thing that is hard. That is a learned skill, and relationships are one of the main places we learn it.
If resilience is built through support and through recoverable challenge, then the job of the adults around a young person is clearer than the tough-it-out story suggests, and in some ways harder.
One of the most consistently identified protective factors in this research is unglamorous: a reliable relationship with an adult who stays steady. Not a perfect adult, a consistent one. Someone whose care does not switch off when the young person is difficult, and does not depend on them performing or achieving. For a lot of young people, that one steady relationship can become a foundation for everything else they are trying to build. If you are that person for a young person in your life, you are doing more than you probably realise.
The second job is to let young people struggle, on purpose, within reach. Give them things that are genuinely hard, that they might not manage on the first go, then resist the two easy mistakes: doing it for them, or leaving them to sink. The useful zone is the one in between, where the challenge is real, the stakes are survivable, and support is close enough to catch a genuine fall. That is where a young person can collect evidence that they can handle things, one recoverable difficulty at a time.
The third is a shift in what we praise. It is worth noticing when we are congratulating a young person for needing nothing, and asking whether that is really what we want to reinforce. Praising a kid primarily for how much they can carry alone can reinforce the idea that carrying it alone is what we value. It costs very little to praise something better instead. How they asked for help, how they came back after a hard week, or how they let someone in.
I have spent a good part of my working life in residential care and around the justice system, and it has left me with a conviction I try to hold onto. In a better world, a lot of that work would not need to exist. Not because the young people in it cannot be helped, but because so many arrived carrying histories of maltreatment, instability, and loss that long pre-dated their justice involvement. The research bears this out. Australian and international studies consistently find high rates of maltreatment, family violence and other childhood adversity among young people involved in the justice system, well above what we see in the wider population. That context does not erase responsibility for the harm anyone causes, but it matters if we are serious about preventing it.
Their resilience is often remarkable. I have watched young people carry loads that would flatten most adults and keep getting up. It would be easy, and it is tempting, to tell that as a simple story of inspiring strength and leave it there. It is not the whole story. The strength is real, and the circumstances that demanded it should never have been theirs to face.
So I try to hold two things at the same time. I want to build resilience in young people, because the world is not the one we would design and they are going to need it. I also refuse to treat the need for it as a good thing, or to admire a young person's strength without asking what it cost them to have to find it. Admiration on its own is cheap. It can even become a way of looking away.
So when I meet a young person who has been through a lot, I try not to reach for the word resilient too quickly, and I try not to treat their coping as proof that they are fine.
The questions I find more useful are quieter. Who is steady in this young person's life? Where is the support they are actually able to lean on? Is the weight they carry something they can recover from, or something slowly wearing a groove in them? If they look like they need nothing at all, what might be sitting behind that?
Resilience is real, and it is worth building. It is just not built the way we tend to think. Not by simply hardening a young person against the world, but by giving them the support, challenge and space to learn that they can meet hard things and come back from them.
Held, not hardened. That is a better place for strength to grow from.
Photo by Cemrecan Yurtman on Unsplash