6 Summary of Session 5

The main learning points of this session are:

• Resilience can be defined in a variety of ways, although at its heart is a sense of doing well ‘against the odds’, coping, and recovering. Resilience is important in helping young people to cope with difficult life challenges or more serious threats to their wellbeing and learning how to be resilient is a key life skill.

• Adversity can create a resilient response, but it can also render a young person more vulnerable to the knocks in life. Multiple sources of adversity can overwhelm a young person’s resilience resources and sometime adversity can lead to disruptive behaviours.

• Brain and neuroscience studies have identified how the brain adapts in response to experience. Different parts of the brain, especially those that are involved in stress responses, are changed by both adversity and environmental protective factors. Genetic make-up, although it may predispose a person to greater or lower resilience, does not mean they cannot adapt and become more resilient.

• Schools have an important role to play in fostering the resilience of young people.

Now to go Session 6 [Tip: hold Ctrl and click a link to open it in a new tab. (Hide tip)] .