Building blocks of resiliency: a transactional framework to guide research, service design, and practice in pediatric rehabilitation
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Purpose: Children's resiliency is seen as important in pediatric rehabilitation, but is seldom the focus of research or intervention. This article presents a resiliency framework to inform pediatric rehabilitation research, service design, and practice.Methods: The development of the framework was guided by a transactional, life course perspective, and a review of self-constructs in the resiliency literature.Results: The framework comprises health-related adversities, self-capacities, self-regulatory processes, and adaptive benefits. Four adaptive self-capacities are highlighted (activity self-efficacy, capacity to marshal resources and supports to achieve goals, capacity to adapt to changing life situations, and capacity to envision a positive future). These self-capacities are linked to common adversities experienced by children with disabilities, namely activity limitations, functioning and participation restrictions, transition issues, and anticipated future life challenges. The self-capacities are also associated with empowered, optimistic, adaptive, and hopeful mindsets, which influence accommodative and assimilative self-regulatory strategies affecting children's adaptive benefits.Conclusions: The framework can inform resiliency-related research exploring self-capacities and resiliency processes. The framework points to what is modifiable through intervention targeting the person-in-context, namely self-capacities, mindsets, and situated experiences. Implications for service design and delivery include providing opportunities and interacting with clients in ways that support the development of these self-capacities.Implications for rehabilitationFostering resiliency means preparing children with disabilities to negotiate and navigate the adversities and challenges they will encounter over their lives.Important resiliency-related self-capacities include activity self-efficacy, capacity to marshal resources and supports to achieve goals, capacity to adapt to changing life situations, and capacity to envision a positive future.The resiliency framework suggests the importance of enhancing children's views of themselves as empowered, optimistic, adaptive, and hopeful.Practice will be enriched by acknowledging that a range of health concerns are relevant to practice, including issues of impairment, functioning, participation, and adaptation.
