Resilience: What It Really Means & The “Ordinary Magic” It Takes to Build It w/ Professor Ann Masten

0:00Ann Masten:The following podcast is a Dear Media production.

0:09Aliza Pressman:Welcome to Raising Good Humans podcast. I'm Dr. Aliza Pressman. And today we are talking about resilience. But the cool thing is that I got Professor Ann Masten to come on the podcast. You might not know her because she's very deep in academia, but she is the most exquisite pioneering researcher on resilience. And she has truly advanced the theory on positive outcomes for children and families. And she has every award you can possibly imagine. She's written gazillions of peer-reviewed articles. And she recently did a second edition of her extraordinary book, Ordinary Magic, Resilience and Development.

1:00Aliza Pressman:And I cannot tell you what a contribution she's made to this field. In her book, Ordinary Magic, she kind of updates the research with key advances in theory and methods and research. And it is a landmark work. It was such a great honor to have Ann Mastin. I wish I could tell you how major she is in this field. I'm like, she's kind of the Meryl Streep of resilience. How about that? So have a listen and have a wonderful day. I would love for you to define resilience and how you came to this definition, because it's the definition that I use. And I think it's the definition in this field, but it's not necessarily the definition that the wider world necessarily means when they say it, if that makes sense.

1:55Aliza Pressman:I think there's a big misunderstanding, and I would just love for you to help us understand the definition of resilience.

2:02Ann Masten:Well, I've always understood resilience in terms of doing well in the context of adversity. But over time, I began to realize we needed a definition that would be amenable to different disciplines that people could understand from different walks of life. And so now I think of resilience as the capacity of a system. I'm fond of children as a living system and their resilience, but I wanted a definition that could apply to other systems as well. I wanted a definition that would work for a family or an economy or for the ecologists out there that are trying to make sure our planet and life on earth endures.

2:46Ann Masten:So I like definitions that are broad. And I define resilience as the capacity of a system to adapt successfully to challenges that have the potential to really harm or destroy that system. And of course, I focused a lot of my research on children and the systems they interact with. So a child is a living system, but connected to many other systems around them. The other people, like their family and friends, a school system, a health system, and so forth. But I wanted a definition that could move across different levels of analysis because we have neuroscientists who are trying to understand the resilience of the body and the mind, the resilience of ourselves, things like that.

3:36Ann Masten:And during COVID, we all learned and appreciated the importance of our immune system and its resilience. And we even went out and got vaccinated to boost it up. But, you know, I want to be able to communicate with humanitarians that are trying to improve the lives of children around the world. And many of the NGOs that help kids around the world have realized that kids depend on multiple systems around them. And it's important not only to make sure that kids have the right nutrition and the right kind of learning experiences, but also that they're supported by families, that the government provides them with resources, that they live in a safe environment, they need housing and shelter.

4:25Ann Masten:It's really a multifaceted task to provide the conditions that foster healthy development and nurture the future resilience of children. I think it's important that we consider not just the immediate resilience of a person or a child, but also recognize, particularly as parents and adults in charge of educating kids and raising kids, that we have this job not only to protect children in the now, but also to invest in their future capacity. And parents naturally do this. I mean, they help their children learn and socialize them and so forth. And schools also do this. They try to help kids learn the skills and tools they will need to succeed in their society.

5:23Ann Masten:But it takes many systems. We talk about it takes a village. I would say I like to think it takes multiple systems, both inside a child and around a child, to both foster resilience for the future, but also to protect children in the now. And many of the threats that we now face in this world are really challenging, and they're multi-system challenges. You know, we have a climate crisis unfolding. We saw what happened when we had a pandemic. I think that one threw us for a loop because we were surprised that an invisible virus can bring the world to a halt because it had cascading effects across system levels, ranging from your immune system and all the ways your body is affected by a virus to our supply chains collapsing, everybody having to stay home.

6:22Ann Masten:And, you know, a lot of the burden fell on parents during COVID, particularly parents with young children, because they were often trying to work from home and deal with so-called distance learning, which was virtually impossible for very young children. I mean, it didn't take long for my kindergarten granddaughter to figure out that distance learning was kind of a waste of time. She just tuned out to, you know, trying to follow what was going on on her little iPad that's from school. But, you know, that experience, I think, really underscored for everyone the importance of understanding resilience at multiple system levels and realizing that children depend on many systems being working well and operating well.

7:15Ann Masten:And some are inside the child, but they also depend on systems around them. Kids depend on their families. Families in turn depend on many systems, health care systems, safety systems, and so forth. So there's so much interconnection in the ways in which we can adapt. And the more, you know, there are large threats like a natural disaster or a pandemic that really show us how interconnected we all are. And it's very difficult to respond and prepare for huge, large-scale disasters for that reason, because so many systems are affected by it. But often we have a smaller crisis. It's in a family or it's in a neighborhood or it's isolated in one area.

8:10Ann Masten:And then other systems and people can come and provide aid to, you know, support, rescue, whether they're going out in their boats to help people off their roofs to get away from a flood, or they're volunteering to go help in another country that needs aid, whatever it is. I mean, we live in an interconnected world. And I think that it's important that our definitions of resilience recognize that. But that's not how we started. At the very beginning, the pioneers that I've studied with wanted to understand how come there are some children who experience adversity or risk who do well, whereas others flounder and really struggle and develop all kinds of problems.

9:04Ann Masten:The pioneers realized we need to understand good development even in the midst of adversity or how kids come out of very dangerous situations, whether it's child maltreatment or a war zone or some other kind of difficulty, how do they overcome that and grow up to be successful, content, contributing members of society? And the quest for understanding resilience and child development grew out of wanting to understand the origins of mental health problems and struggles and behavioral problems. But when people began to study kids who they believed to be at risk for problems, you know, because they were living in poverty or they had experienced maltreatment or whatever it was, they soon observed if they followed a group of kids that a lot of the children coming out of difficult circumstances were doing surprisingly well.

10:10Ann Masten:Surprising to them at the time, because they were expecting to see the origins of problems. But what they began to see was that there are children who do well, and they went on a mission. Pioneers like my mentor, Norman Garmasy, Michael Rutter, Emmy Werner, they were captivated by these observations. individual cases as well as large-scale studies of kids. Like, how do we explain this? And I think their great insight was realizing not just that there were good outcomes, even when kids had difficult origins, but also they realized that was important for us to know. It's not enough to understand why kids have problems.

11:00Ann Masten:We have to understand how kids avoid problems and how they overcome them and how they recover. What makes the difference? This was the big question for people when we started out. And it was really focused on individual children and can we figure out what the protective factors are in their life? And then can we figure out how that works? And could we then translate that into interventions for kids to try to foster and promote better outcomes among children who may be at risk. And now for a quick break.

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15:18Aliza Pressman:Right. And you just talked about and I just wanted you to expand. And would you say, I guess I'm looking for a warm blanket of soothing for everybody, that the more typical response is going to be humans wiring for resilience. Like we see really cool things happening when you think they can't.

15:42Ann Masten:Well, I'm not fond of the word wiring because it sounds too thick. Yeah, what's a better word? Because you're right. I think it's important to remember is that we are a very adaptive species. And when you look at the list of prominent protective factors that come up all over the world, it's not surprising that they would emerge all over the place because they are adaptive. I mean, that over generations, the capacity to learn and adapt has been naturally selected, and also in cultures, through cultural evolution. Cultures figure out what matters to promote, what should we be promoting in kids, what are traditions that promote good development.

16:38Ann Masten:So, you know, I think that the fundamental protective systems that underlie the factors we see as mattering for kids and adversity are the product of many generations of evolution. But it's not just biological evolution. It's cultural evolution as well. We are social. We are culturally embedded. And from one generation to another, we learn and we shape and foster the learning and experiences that make for better adaptation. We've learned to survive, and the survivors pass on a lot of their skills, and they pass on their biology as well. On the other hand, clearly, there are threats that come out of the blue.

17:33Ann Masten:There are threats that are overwhelming. And, you know, no child is invulnerable. In the very early days of resilience research, people sometimes talked about the invulnerable children. And of course, there's no such thing. And that's what the myth of Achilles was about. There's no such thing as invulnerability. We're all vulnerable. But children are particularly vulnerable to the loss or separation from caregivers because they're very dependent on care from other people. But I think that we have this capacity, but it still has to be nurtured. And we have to foster resilience. And not all children end up in a situation where that happens.

18:27Ann Masten:You know, there's a situation that some children in the world don't get the basic nutrition for brain development. And you've often talked about toxic stress in your books and in your podcast. Overwhelming stress can disrupt the biology as well as the social interactions of children, and they may go down a negative path. In fact, many of the powerful drivers of behavior, the most important adaptive systems can actually be hijacked and put to a negative use. I mean, I think that there are gang leaders who know how to do this. It's kind of like your brain can be hijacked by drug addiction, too. Our reward systems are normally very powerful and positive.

19:22Ann Masten:That's what you can watch delighted kids learning to walk or throwing things off the high chair. They're just thrilled to be having an effect on the world. And they feel rewarded and excited about accomplishment. Good teachers and coaches know how to tap into that, right? So get people excited. But there are drugs and also negative leaders who can tap into that as well. And so I like to keep that in mind. It's not always the case that the adaptive systems that evolved because they are protective and help you survive are always put to the best use. Right. Right.

20:09Aliza Pressman:And I think that positive adaptation is the key because there can be adaptation that goes awry. I can't help but think, I mean, I always think about this, but I happen to be, I think, lightly obsessed with this because my grandparents are Holocaust survivors and my grandfather's still alive. He's 101. And so he's still talking about it all the time because he's in a race against time in a way he feels like he wants to make sure that we know every story. And I just recently asked him because I feel like I grew up with this idea that I come from, you know, this resilient lineage and my kids and I have often talked about the bizarre like messaging because nobody, that's not a flex to have survived something like that.

21:12Aliza Pressman:It's just, and my grandfather, when I ask him, like, what do you think? It's not like he was more resilient. He just hit, there were like multiple magic moments in both of their lives during that terrible time that allowed them to survive this terrible circumstance and then finding each other, their actual relationship, I think is why they were able to have a family and grow into relatively happy, functioning people with, of course, this massive part of them that will never, you know, never healed. But I think it was just the fact that they had each other that allowed them to, like, I don't know that there were any internal systems in either of them.

22:04Aliza Pressman:Who knows? But it felt so much to them. There could have been more variations in how robust

22:11Ann Masten:people were to biological threats or starvation. I mean, there were all kinds of terrible threats and people vary in their sensitivity to both, you know, starvation or to whatever. Certainly there are variations in sensitivity to different kinds of experiences. But, you know, there was a lot of just pure luck involved. Right, pure luck. Who was standing where, you know. Exactly. I mean, just really, but, you know, I've always thought it interesting, both in Viktor Frankl's account in a concentration camp, this famous account of how a sunset gave people hope. I mean, the idea that people in a concentration camp could be so moved to feel hope from a sunset, but this natural beauty, and he describes it reflected in the mud puddles of the concentration camp.

23:11Ann Masten:And there are other accounts of, you know, war, children in war, where they suddenly realize one, there's a book called To Destroy You With No Loss about a Cambodian survivor of the killing fields. and she describes an epiphany where she is she's in a terrible situation as a teen and a friend of hers has died after being attacked by people and everybody's sort of giving up hope and they start carrying poison around in their pockets so they kill themselves before they get tortured or whatever and then but she has this epiphany where she's watching the the sky again nature and realizing, you know, the Khmer Rouge don't control what's happening in nature.

24:00Ann Masten:And it just gives her hope for the future. And, you know, just those moments of hope. But hope is a very powerful and very human motivator. And sometimes it comes, you know, through these, you know, sudden beautiful moments that kind of help step back from the current misery to realize not everything is horrible. Gives a sense of hope. I mean, there are individual differences in physical robustness and stress regulation systems and how susceptible you are to different kinds of environmental exposures. But within the range of normal human capabilities and so forth, you know, there certainly is a lot of potential capacity, but anybody can be overwhelmed as well.

24:59Aliza Pressman:So if I move to the like most of the, hopefully anybody who's taking the time to listen to this, I'm hoping is not, we're not talking about these extreme circumstances. I want to talk about kind of the everyday child and the everyday circumstances. And one of the things that I wanted to ask you about is, again, what you just mentioned is individual differences in temperament and sensitivity and resilience.

25:29Ann Masten:I mean, there's so many individual differences in our children. And I think it's important for parents to, I mean, they know their kids the best and to kind of, they learn from experience what bugs their children, what sets them off, what they're reactive to. And of course, developmentally, that will vary as well. Kids may be very sensitive at some point in time to rejection from a friend or something, but they may change as they get older and have a different take on life. So, I mean, I think it's important for parents to realize that kids do vary in sensitivity and what they're reactive to. And I think most parents learn this by experience.

26:19Ann Masten:And especially when they have more than one child and realize their kids are really sensitive to different things. Or are there just some kids who kind of just easily blow everything off? They're just kind of, you know, not bothered by very much. They're more easygoing and using the temperament language. Sometimes those sensitive kids, you know, they're intense in a way and they can, you know, apply that intensity in positive ways too. They can get, you know, they may be driven to really understand something deeply. If they have the right opportunities, they can really blossom. So, you know, I think it's important to appreciate the individual sensitivities and differences in kids and also realize that those are always changing, too, as kids develop.

27:10Aliza Pressman:So is it, I guess it's like, there's both a burden and a relief in our role as parents. And I guess I'm trying to figure out, like, I think of it as a relief that our presence is powerful, but I could also see parents blaming themselves if that wasn't enough.

27:36Ann Masten:Yeah, but I think one of the themes that really comes through in your parenting book is, you know, good enough is good enough. I mean, development is on your side, on the side of parenting, and adaptation is on your side. You know, there's a general, I think, you know, a lot of the adaptive systems that come naturally to kids are they bend toward the positive. And, you know, so development is on your side. And, you know, as kids, it's always been very striking. There's, you know, as kids make the transition to adulthood, even kids that get off track in adolescence, A number of them will turn in a more positive direction as they move into adulthood.

28:28Ann Masten:And, you know, I think that, you know, certainly parents have influence. But, you know, I think all parents realize as their kids go to school and then they form friendships and then they move into adolescence where friends have even more influence. There's a lot going on in the life of a child. And so parents only have limited influence, which is a good thing. And that there's more to raising children than one parent. But in emergencies, parents play a huge role. I mean, I've done a lot of research locally with families experiencing homelessness. and, you know, in a situation, an unhoused situation or in a shelter for homeless families, the role of a parent really changes because the family may be cut off from other support systems.

29:25Ann Masten:And then, you know, it's really important for, you know, the parents to play a role of reconnecting their kids to support systems, making sure they get to school and so forth. And, you know, I think when parents are in that kind of situation, it's really important that we have recognized that they need support. You know, parents are important, but they need support. They can't do it on their own.

29:52Aliza Pressman:And now for a quick break. This episode is brought to you in part by BetterHelp. Now, of course, we want to take a moment. March includes International Women's Day, a moment to celebrate women's strength and progress and also recognizing how much we carry every day. We care for others. We manage unseen responsibilities. We manage other people's emotional wellbeing. Hours can get very overlooked. So BetterHelp wants to remind women how much they matter and offer therapy in a space to take care of themselves because we do deserve to put our oxygen mask on first. So I'm inviting listeners to use BetterHelp if you've been considering therapy, but just feel like there's no way you can put yourself first.