Resiliency, Identity, and Competence

Overview: Drawing Connections

For all youth, the adolescent period is widely understood as a time of rapid biological, psychosocial, and cognitive growth and development. It is the critical life stage where competence is sought and tested across domains, resiliency is acquired, and stable identities emerge. The period is accompanied by different sources and experiences of risk and requires the accessing and use of a variety of protective factors. As a function of socioeconomic and particularly structurally determined social conditions, all youth are confronted by challenges but do not experience the same levels and types of risk as each navigates often under-supervised rough social terrain.

Analogously, youth do not necessarily need nor have access to the same or similar levels of protective factors necessary for smoothing out the rough surfaces navigated. To illustrate, for diverse youth of privilege, an under-acknowledged dilemma, which Spencer describes as the downside of privilege, operates and compromises coping opportunities. That is, traditional youthful risks associated with the challenges experienced when confronting normative adolescent stage-associated developmental tasks are neutralized. In fact, the neutralization of potentially uncomfortable coping requirements occurs as a function of afforded indulgences provided by group status–associated privileges. Significant and overly generous (though unacknowledged) protective factors are enjoyed by privileged youth as physically and psychologically enveloping broad-based supports. Accordingly, privileged youth miss opportunities to cope independently with and to learn from the solving of normal youth issues and developmental tasks. Equally important is that society comes to see their outcomes as “the norm” for development no matter the developmental period. Consequently, privileged youths' protective factor–infused responses to developmental tasks are viewed as the standard against which others are compared; not unexpected, only disparity findings are possible when examined across groups. On the other hand, the process for diverse youth of color in the United States is decidedly different.

Thus, for youth of color or for other marginalized American youth more generally (e.g., immigrant youth or significantly impoverished young people), complications develop when nonnormative experiences are confronted or when normative tasks are pursued. Particularly for youth of color, when they attempt (a) to define themselves in positive ways given stereotyping, (b) to navigate racism-laced contexts and typecasting but still manage (c) to demonstrate the broad competencies associated with the developmental period, the positive outcome is not fully acknowledged. Youths' demonstrations of resiliency (i.e., obtaining good outcomes in the face of challenge) are frequently under-acknowledged as such, at best; in fact, more frequently than not, such events are ignored or the language representation demeaned and devalued by misappropriating the relevant language or label to irreverent items (e.g., hair relevant products such as shampoo and conditioners—i.e., the acquisition of resilient hair!). As a result, the unique challenges associated with persistent poverty and racism are ignored, and policy-relevant protective factors and needed youth performance enhancing supports are overlooked (e.g., the specifics needed for appropriate and efficacious teacher training programs).

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