Cultural Roots of Well-Being and Resilience in Child Mental Health

Abstract

This chapter explores childhood mental health and well-being using a resilience framework to integrate the interactions of sociocultural protective factors at individual, familial, and community levels. Resilience has been described both as a trait and as a process as it evolves on development, social, and epigenetic trajectories. Research with migrant, refugee, and aboriginal populations suggests that our understanding of resilience must integrate complex sociocultural variables. Three brief case studies illustrate how successful encounters with adversity by children, families, and communities are influenced by cultural contexts. More specifically, these case studies of a South Asian migrant, a Somali refugee youth in Canada, and a Mayan community in Mexico underscore our premise that resilience is a dynamic process in which multiple levels of individual, family, and wider social contexts interact to create possibilities for individual and collective adaptation.