Pathways to Resilience III: Beyond Nature vs. Nurture

Resilience: Biocultural Perspectives on Child and Family Wellbeing
Speaker: Catherine Panther-Brick
Resilience-focused work offers us a transformative framework to connect the dots from biology and culture with respect to domains of health and wellbeing. To illustrate this, I draw on research and intervention efforts to foster child and family wellbeing in settings of violence, poverty, or discrimination. These include a global movement to foster positive changes in early child development and to build peace in conflict-affected communities, and novel approaches to parenting interventions to improve family and child outcomes. In my work, I address often-asked questions such as “how is child and family resilience best promoted across cultures?” or “what do we know about family dynamics and child development that provide the best leverage points for intervention?” Resilience has important normative dimensions: communities facing life-long adversity anchor their goals, decisions, and behaviors in systems of meaning and processes of decision-making that go far beyond simple consideration of health outcomes and social functioning. In future work, one challenge includes articulating the cultural ecology and political economy of resilience together with sound understanding of human biological development.