How to use the Resilience Framework

The Resilience Framework summarises a set of ideas and practices that promote resilience. It is based on a body of research and practice development called Resilient Therapy (RT). We distilled what the research base said into a handy table that summarises our approach and acts as a reminder to people of what’s included. So while the Resilience Framework Summary Table does look pretty simple, there’s quite a lot of work behind it.

Resilience Framework Children and Young People

The Five Compartments

The Summary Table visually shows you how we have split our ideas under five headings or compartments to help us think strategically and practically about doing things resiliently. Within each of these compartments is a selection of evidenced based ideas or remedies, to draw on when trying to make a resilient move with a child, young person, family or adult. You can find out more about each compartment below:

Basics

The resilience research base didn’t have that much to say about the basic things we need in life to get by, but from our practice and parenting experience, we think that attending to the Basics is seriously important. So the ideas in this section are all about sorting out seemingly simple things. But as anyone who’s ever had no fixed abode will know, having a decent roof over your head is something worth prioritising. And for some people, it’s no good going on about other things in their life, like careers or school work for example, unless you get some of these basics sorted first.

Belonging

This puts good relationships at the heart of things. It focuses on reminding us to have and look after healthy relationships and to tap into good influences instead of bad ones. It recommends concentrating on the good times and places, find people we and our children can count on and remain hopeful about building new contacts.

Learning

The importance of finding out about and discovering new things. So it’s not just about sorting a child’s schooling, although this is really important, it’s also about less formal ways of learning, like making sure we develop interests, talents and life skills. It encourages us to follow up new and old interests, dare to have a vision for a life plan or a future full of doing new things. It reminds us of the value of getting organized, noticing our achievements and developing new skills.

Coping

This is all about those things we and our children do to help us get by in everyday ways. Like those times when we need to be brave, solve problems and stand up for our own views and beliefs. It’s about putting on rose-tinted glasses when we need to, looking after our talents, finding ways to stay calm, remembering that tomorrow’s a new day and leaning on others when its necessary.

Core Self

This puts the focus on our inner worlds – those thoughts and beliefs we have about ourselves that build our characters. This compartment concentrates on ways of being hopeful, finding our own sense of morality, using all of our senses to get a good solid idea of who we are. It encourages us to take responsibility for ourselves, face problems and seek help when it makes sense to do so.

The Noble Truths

We also have a group of four ‘noble truths’ that underpin these 5 compartments and their resilient moves. These are those fundamental starting places we need if we are interested in building resilient capital with children, young people, families and adults. They encapsulate the underlying beliefs, values and attitudes needed to make RT work and include: acceptance, conservation, commitment and enlisting. While not unique to RT – you’ll find them in some shape or form in most therapeutic schools of thought including for example, Rogerian, psycho-dynamic, cognitive behavioural and family therapy approaches – they are essential to successful RT work.

Accepting

Starting with exactly where a child, young person or family is at, even if it means being at a very sore point. Returning to ‘unconditional positive regard’, which means trying not to judge people and appreciating them or their basic humanity come what may.

Conserving

Holding on to anything good that has happened up until now and building on it. When there is so much difficulty around, preserving the little positive that there is becomes even more precious.

Commitment

Staying in there and being explicit about what your commitment can be. Being realistic about what’s doable, and not giving up or expecting things to change overnight.

Enlisting

Seeking others to help, and moving on from those who might have let us down in the past, noticing that we may not be enough or we may be too much.

If you really want to get stuck into understanding how we put the Resilience Framework together, and get more detailed information about how to use it, you might want to get hold of one of our books or attend one of our training courses. And if you’re the sort of person who likes a bit of a recipe approach, then take a look at our 10 Steps to Applying Resilient Therapy reminder sheet (also available in Danish).

However, you’ll find plenty of examples of how people have put our ideas into practice on our website, so don’t bother buying a book before you’ve had a good look around. We’ve added some links bottom of this page to help you along your way.

You can also find more detailed information about each element of the Resilience Framework on our Interactive Resilience Framework which is designed to be user-friendly, allowing you to click on areas that interest you to find out more. It was developed especially for working with schools, holding the children and young people in mind, and is one of the resources from the Academic Resilience Approach.

Using the Resilience Framework

You can see and download the current versions of the Framework on our Resilience Framework download page, including translations in a range of languages. We’re always interested and excited when people want to use our work in new and creative ways or different contexts so do let us know how you get on with it or get in touch if you might like to collaborate on a project or co-productive research. However, so that we can maintain our academic and intellectual integrity we’ve put together a few guidelines that we’d like you to follow:

Please clearly acknowledge Boingboing in anything that you draw on in your own work, and add links to the Boingboing website so that users can access the detailed rationale and processes applied to using our tools.
When you use the Framework please make sure you reference it fully, e.g., ‘Resilience Framework (Children and Young People) Oct 2012 – Boingboing, adapted from Hart and Blincow with Thomas 2007’.
Please don’t change the Framework! People make lots of really interesting suggestions for things that could be included, some of which do get developed into alternative versions of the Framework (e.g., adult and family versions), but as our work is evidence-based, we need robust supporting evidence to back up any changes. So if you’ve got some evidence and ideas, please use them in your own name or sound them out with us.
When you are using the Framework we’d ask you to stay true to the Boingboing aim, which is ‘To model and promote resilience research and practice that challenges social inequalities drawing on all our skills as staff, volunteers and friends.’ For us that means working co-productively, inclusively with the individual and wider system or context.

If you’ve got any other questions about using our stuff please e-mail us.

An introduction to the Research Ready Communities pilot

For the past year and a half Boingboing has been working on a Research Ready Communities pilot project in Blackpool alongside the National Institute for Health Research as part of their Under-served Communities programme. Typically, much of the funding for health research in the UK goes to universities in London, Oxford and Cambridge, but health research is needed the most in places like Blackpool, where the harmful impacts of health inequalities are worst felt.

Ready, Set, Resilience

Ready, Set, Resilience is a workbook and supporting guidance created to support young people’s resilience aimed at year 9 students. It uses mixture of activities which support individual resilience (beating the odds) and activities to support changing the odds like activism.

More Than Words: Supporting effective communication with autistic people in health care settings

Over several months our autistic CSRJ and Boingboing colleague, Dr Gemma Williams, worked with a stakeholder group to co-produce some guidelines for communicating well with autistic people in healthcare settings.