We are born into some form of family and those circumstances are different for everyone. If you are fortunate enough to experience love in your family, from at least one important person, you have a good start. Most families experience difficulties of some form as there have always been great pressures in meeting all of the needs of a family, including physical, emotional and economic. Most people do not have training for leading a family or for parenting. Some people are fortunate to be raised in a highly functional and loving family, but unfortunately that is often not the case. As you grow and develop the dynamics of your family can adversely affect your emotional development and sense of security. This can lead to unhealthy behavior and slow your progress on the path to a balanced and productive life. It is important to appreciate the positive aspects of your upbringing, to recognize the love, support and encouragement you did receive along the way.
Realize that most families are imperfect and the sooner you can heal any emotional wounds from childhood, perhaps even forgive family members for their mistakes, the better for your long term wellbeing. If your family is wonderful and your upbringing has been ideal then you are particularly fortunate and should certainly be appreciative and grateful for the tremendous advantage you have been granted. The more you can maintain close connection to any loving family members the more enriched your life will be. Families are sometimes planned in advance, and sometimes they are not. Human reproduction happens both in the context of a loving relationship and in the context of sexual activity outside of stable relationships. In both cases, parenting is a difficult job. There are obvious advantages to having more than one parent, both for providing resources, division of labor, and for the different strengths people bring to the parenting role, such as emotional support, skill building, and values transmission. A single parent can do these things but it is more difficult.
Humans are also innately wired through natural selection to have an increased sensitivity to their biological kin, particularly offspring. This is a variable trait in its expression, but remains fairly strong in the population as a whole. With the pressures on relationships and the common tendency for marriage and relationship dissolution, co-parenting outside of a family relationship, as well as step-parenting in a newly formed relationship pose additional challenges and difficulties. Add financial pressure, emotional imbalance, drug or alcohol abuse, physical, sexual or emotional abuse, obligations and time pressure, and family life gets harder. Children too commonly need to adapt to unstable circumstances and some of their coping strategies lead to emotional and physical problems during and after childhood. Building resilience during childhood and in adulthood is the best strategy to overcome these problems and challenges.
Resilience is the ability to bounce back from difficult circumstances. It is the ability to adapt to adversity and various sources of significant stress or trauma. It is a combination of thoughts and behaviors that can be learned and developed. The primary factor in building resilience is having caring supportive relationships within and outside of the family. Having a loving, trusted and supportive role model that provides encouragement fosters resiliency. Additional factors include the ability to make plans and carry them out, positive view of personal strengths, communication and problem solving skills, and management of strong feelings and impulses. It is really a personal journey and different strategies can work for different people.
Some common resilience building strategies include: fostering connection with loving family or friends, acceptance of change, pursuit of goals, self discovery, self care, positive self regard, maintaining hope, spiritual practice, developing purpose, and keeping perspective on problems and building confidence in problem solving ability. Emotional flexibility, allowing the experience of strong emotions and the ability to regulate strong emotion when necessary to maintain function is an important resiliency skill. Decision making and learning to take decisive action in the face of adversity is another relevant skill to develop to build resilience. Healthy families foster the development of resiliency skills somewhat naturally simply through love, support, values and good communication. We all can strive to build resilience in our children and ourselves as we navigate the journey of life and the challenges and adversity faced by family, in growing up, parenting and maturing. This will in turn enhance joyful experience, promote healing and relieve considerable suffering.