Adolescents’ individual resilience and its association with security threats, anxiety and family resilience

Abstract

ABSTRACT The current study explored the association between family resilience, anxiety, and individual resilience of adolescents in times of ongoing security threats. We examined 89 dyads of parents and adolescents exposed to rocket attacks for 13 years. The investigated variables included exposure to security threats, gender, anxiety, individual resilience, self-differentiation, and family resilience. The results indicate that youth who believed their family to be resilient were also more individually resilient and suffered less anxiety in the face of security tensions. Furthermore, adolescents with higher self-differentiation reported higher individual resilience. Adolescents’ perceptions of family resilience mediated the relationship between the parents’ perceptions of family resilience and the adolescents’ individual resilience and anxiety. It was also found that mothers and daughters reported more anxiety than fathers and sons and that adolescents displayed higher levels of self-differentiation than their parents. Overall, the results indicate that family resilience is the collective product of a shared and interactive process. The practical implications of the results include guidelines for developing programmes for families aimed to increase family resilience by enhancing their skills, such as positive family communication and problem solving skills, in order to increase their adolescents’ individual resilience.