During a presentation a few years
ago in Dayton, Ohio a school board
member asked me. "If resiliency is
so real, why are our young people
struggling so?" This book provides
a research-based, in-depth answer
to that question. More importantly,
it provides information about how
families, schools, agencies, churches,
and all youth-serving organizations
can turn the situation around.
I answered
the board member this way: "Young
people need certain things in their
lives to foster their resiliency.
I have diagrammed these in The Resiliency
Wheel. For many young people, the
strands of The Wheel, which represent
resiliency builders as well as basic
human needs, are to a large degree,
missing. What needs to be done is
this: Put each young person in the
center of The Wheel, and begin weaving
as many strands as possible in as
many places as possible in his or
her life." 
I developed the wheel as a visual
representation of what numerous studies
show people need to successfully meet
life's challenges, including bouncing
back from the stresses along the wave.
Even though our world has "progressed"
in many ways during the past decades,
we have paid a price. The strands
of many people's Resiliency Wheels
have been strained by the fast-paced,
highly transitory, individual-achievement
focus of our present culture.
Young people feel this loss most acutely.
In short, many of them are not experiencing
the strands of The Wheel, which show
up in these or similar terms in almost
all of the discussions by youth
experts about what is necessary for
"positive youth development." The
most important strand of The
Wheel the foundation upon which the
other strands are built—is caring
and supportive relationships. When
I ask resilient young people, some
of whom speak out in this book, about
how they bounced back from drug use,
violence, school failure, and teen
pregnancy, they always first name
the people who made a difference for
them. They talk with animation about
the qualities of these people, about
how they not only expressed consistent,
non-judgmental caring, but also how
they empowered, inspired, and provided
a mirror and model of what could be.
A crucial message in this book is
that the quality of person-to-person
relationships is the most important
consideration in fostering youth resiliency.
A concern expressed throughout is
that it is not enough just to provide
"resilient' Building," "asset-promoting"
structures (programs) for kids. Our
work must go deeper.
As Bonnie Benard so eloquently puts
it in her chapter on "How to Be Turnaround
Teacher/Mentor":
Resilience
research points out over and over
that transformational power exists
not in programmatic approaches
per se, but at the deeper level
of relationships, beliefs and
expectations, and the willingness
to share power. In other words,
it is how adults do what they
do that counts.
It is our hope that this book will
add this crucial focus to the current
national effort to provide more "youth
programs." The programs described
herein examples of approaches that
work. To some degree their success
can be attribute to an effective structure.
But more importantly, these programs
succeed because at their core are
caring, supportive, empowering relationships—the
single most important factor in movie
youth from "stressed to success. "
Nan
Henderson, M.S.W.
San Diego, CA
March, 2000
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