Adolescent Coping

Promoting Resilience and Well-Being

Erica Frydenberg

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138055704
• eBook ISBN: 9781351677271
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

How do young people cope with the multitude of difficult situations and scenarios that are associated with growing up, like anxiety and depression, as well as illness, rejection and family breakdown? How can we facilitate and encourage, through a combination of health, well-being and positive mindset, healthy development during adolescence and beyond?

With a substantial focus on the positive aspects of coping, including an emphasis on developing resilience and the achievement of happiness, Erica Frydenberg presents the latest developments in the field of coping. Adolescent Coping highlights the ways in which coping can be measured and implemented in a wide range of circumstances and contexts, with suggestions for the development of coping skills and coping skills training, and it provides strong scholarly evidence for the concepts and constructs that it promotes as providing a pathway to resilience. The work is framed as an ongoing interaction between individuals and their environments as represented by the psychosocial ecological model of Bronfenbrenner.

The major theories of coping are articulated that take account of the transactional model, resources theories and proactive models of coping. Areas of recent interest such as neuroscience and epigenetics are included, alongside a new chapter, 'Cyberworld', which provides insights on new and relevant topics such as mindfulness and the impact of social media as they relate to coping in the contemporary context.

Adolescent Coping will be of interest to practitioners in psychology, social work, sociology, education and youth and community work as well as to students on courses in adolescent development in these fields.

1 Positive psychology and related constructs

Coping is having life problems and dealing with them in a mature way and resilience is having patience and having faith.

(Male, 14.8 years)

Adolescence is a period of transition from childhood to adulthood. In recent years it has been considered to cover the period between ten and 19 years of age, a period that requires navigation on the part of the adolescent and those around him/her to develop knowledge and skills which are fundamental to assuming adult roles (WHO, 2017).¹ It is the period when issues around puberty, gaining independence from parental influence, dealing with sexual concerns and decision making have to be managed (see Spear, 2000a). The focus of this volume is on adolescents in the context of their worlds and how they cope. More particularly, how coping skills can be a tool for achieving resilience.

The period has been described as a ‘moving target’ in which development and adjustment are not predictable. It can be both a particularly stressful period of life and a very significant time for the development and practice of personal coping skills. It is the time in which a progressive shift occurs in stress reaction and coping, predicated upon major biological and cognitive changes, including neurochemical, hormonal, steroidal and structural changes in the body and brain (Spear, 2000b).

Our view of adolescence as a cohort is also undergoing change. In the 1980s the concern was that adolescents were growing up too fast and too soon as they matured physically and socially, being sexually active at an early age and grappling with family stresses such as parental divorce or separation (Elkind, 1988). This is no longer the case. In 2017 a landmark study of eight million American youth, who were compared to their counterparts of several decades earlier (Twenge & Park, 2017), found that adolescents are growing up more slowly, with 18-year-olds being more like the 15-year-olds of previous decades. They are less likely to have a job, date, leave the house without their parents, drive or have sex. Parents are much more involved in their children’s lives and provide fewer opportunities for them to become adults. The mobile phone has been described as the longest umbilical cord. Technology certainly looms large in young people’s lives.

Furthermore, since I wrote Adolescent Coping: Advances in Theory Research and Practice, there have also been developments in several interrelated movements in the field of psychology that contribute to our understanding of how people cope and how they go beyond coping to flourish, enjoy well-being and achieve happiness. The developments are complimentary and synergistic. This chapter considers these theoretical developments and how the field of coping can be located in the context of contemporary psychology research and practice.

The most significant of these developments has been positive psychology. The positive psychology movement has been strongly propelled by the work of Martin Seligman and his colleagues and can be construed as an orientation that incorporates well-being and resilience. Researchers and practitioners have considered the benefits of seeing life from a perspective that focuses on ability rather than disability, on health and well-being and on what people can do rather than focusing on pathology and what people cannot do. In a complementary way approaches to well-being focus not just on the absence of illness but also on how well people can manage their lives to achieve a state of well-being in multiple domains. Resilience too has become very much part of the positive psychology movement with its focus on how people recover from adversity and, more recently, on how they can move forward in their lives. Positive psychology is a philosophical approach that underpins human endeavour and, along with the related and complementary concepts of emotional intelligence, hope, grit, mindset and mindfulness, can be integrated and accommodated into coping research and practice. These related constructs have been adopted into the positive psychology movement and highlight how our understandings of human endeavour are continuously evolving.

As a precursor to some of these developments in the positive psychology domain, the socio-cultural approach to human endeavour underpins our understandings of how people interact and react within their environments. Coping and development do not occur in isolation; understanding and promoting adolescent development and adaption needs to be located in a socio-cultural context.

1.1 The socio-ecological model

Bronfenbrenner’s (1978) socio-ecological systemic approach is a good fit for understanding how people cope, that is, coping in context. The socio-ecological model posits that the relationship between individuals and their environments is reciprocal in that individuals are influenced by their environments and in turn impact their environments. Micro systems, such as family, school, workplace and neighbourhood, bear a direct influence on the individual; these are complemented by the macro systems, that is, the socio-cultural political context in which the individual is located. So, cultural contextual influences along with the more direct family, peer, school and workplace influences are important. It is the environment in which individuals operate, taking account of both proximal (e.g. school, workplace) and distal (e.g. economic, cultural) factors. In the 1980s Bronfenbrenner emphasised that both the ecological and developmental contexts are relevant. As with coping, there is an assumption that there is a bidirectional transaction between individuals and their environments and an interplay between context and development (see Chapter 7 for more detail on Bronfenbrenner’s model). Thus, when it comes to resilience and coping, the philosophical, socio-cultural and developmental influences are all relevant and need to be taken into consideration.

1.2 Positive psychology

Towards the end of the 20th century, Martin Seligman, during his term as President of the American Psychological Association, encouraged us to look at what is going well rather than what is going wrong in our lives. This personal shift in thinking, by influential figures in contemporary psychology such as Seligman and Csikszentmihalyi (2000), has propelled widespread international interest in research and practice in mental and physical health and a belief in a capacity to learn skills to enhance well-being in individuals and communities. Achieving well-being and a capability to deal effectively with life situations requires a confluence of factors, including an environment that is conducive to growth and achieving satisfaction with life. For both adults and children to flourish in school, family and community, there is a requirement that everybody meets their basic needs, such as having adequate food and shelter and feeling safe and cared for. In addition, certain skills can be learned to maximise growth and potential for individuals within their contexts. When basic needs are met, and there is adequate self-worth and support from others, the individual can ‘self-actualise’ and achieve goals to flourish.

[Positive psychology] at the personal level is about having experiences that are valued, having a sense of wellbeing, contentment, and satisfaction (in the past); hope and optimism (for the future); and happiness (in the present). At the individual level, it is about having a capacity for love and endeavour, courage, interpersonal skill, aesthetic sensibility, perseverance, forgiveness, originality, future mindedness, spirituality, high talent, and wisdom. At the group level, it is about the civic virtues and the institutions that move individuals toward better citizenship: responsibility, nurturance, altruism, civility, moderation, tolerance, and work ethic.

This frequently cited definition (adapted from Seligman & Csikszentmihalyi, 2000, p. 5), highlights the fact that positive psychology is concerned with achieving a state of happiness and satisfaction as well as with good citizenship. It is about achieving pleasure from positive experiences and contributing to the greater good.

The four pillars of positive psychology have been described as virtue, meaning, resilience and well-being. While positive psychology is an orientation that was born out of work with adults, many of the tenets and pillars have relevance for adolescents. Children often imitate or aspire to do whatever adults around them do. However, by adolescence this may be reflected as a wish to be different and to express their individual identity. The foundations for social learning are set in the early years and continue to develop throughout the adolescent years into adulthood. To be virtuous is not just about being good, but also about focusing on the common good, that is, compassion for others, often reflected in empathy, giving and sharing. The centrality of meaning is an adult concept in terms of creating the good life. For adolescents it is often expressed in terms of caring about issues that resonate, such as the environment, eliminating poverty or world peace.

Finding meaning has been associated with positive emotion, achievement, relationship, intimacy, religion/spirituality, self-transcendence, self-acceptance and fairness/social justice (Wong, 1989). Much of this applies to adolescents and can be learned both within and external to the family. The concepts are reflected in the coping literature.

1.2.1 Happiness

Happiness is ultimately the striving that is innate and not readily achieved but, according to Seligman on his website, the best recommendation for happiness is to locate your strengths and find new ways to deploy them. Adults can certainly locate their strengths and find creative ways to utilise them and adults can also help adolescents to do that. All the evidence points to the fact that people clearly want to be happy. Indeed, happiness is what parents want for their children (Seligman, 2011). And we know that those who achieve happiness across the lifespan are buoyed and sustained by good relationships and helpful coping strategies (Martin-Joy et al., 2017).

Well-being itself is also a much-used concept that has been linked to happiness. We all strive for well-being. It is not just the absence of ill health or not being disappointed when we strive for something that we do not achieve, it is about experiencing positive emotions, being able to savour the moment and having satisfaction. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (2008), the co-founder, with Seligman, of the positive psychology movement, pointed out that rather than happiness being something that just happens to us it is something that we ‘make happen’.

Three core components are necessary for positive mental health, namely, emotional well-being, physiological well-being and social well-being (Westerhof & Keyes, 2010). From a philosophical perspective, emotional well-being has been divided into two areas. From the Aristotelian Greek word there is feeling good or hedonic well-being, which is characterised by the pursuit of pleasure that is generally measured using positive affect; namely cheerfulness, happiness and contentment. Additionally, there is the pursuit of functioning well in life or eudaimonic well-being. This focuses on psychological and social well-being (Huppert & Johnson, 2010). It is the psychological well-being that is required for optimal functioning and not just the absence of psychological ill-health (Keyes, 2007). Psychological well-being is about having a purpose and meaning, while social well-being is about a belief that life matters and contributing as a member of society. This provides a purpose, contribution, intimacy, acceptance and mastery in life (Sin & Lyubomirsky, 2009).

While positive psychology has emphasised the experience of positive emotions, it does not imply that we are not interested in also identifying and labelling negative emotions. We learn to appreciate the good through negative experiences and losses. However, generally it is through the positive emotional experiences that we broaden and build our personal resources for living the good life (Fredrickson, 2004). As adults, we strive to build resources such as the physical, psychological, intellectual and social. Positive psychology is intrinsically associated with well-being.

1.3 Well-being

Historically, conceptualisations of well-being tend to equate it with the absence of distress and negative conditions, while more recently well-being has been conceptualised as the prevalence of positive self-attributes, such as positive affect and mental and physical health (Ryff & Singer, 2008; Keyes, 2002). For example, the National Survey of Mental Health and Well-being, the largest study of child and adolescent mental health conducted in Australia, and one of the few national studies conducted in the world, characterised well-being as the absence of ‘mental disorders’ (Sawyer, Kosky, Graetz, Arney, & Zubrick, 2000). In contrast, Fraillon (2004) proposed a child and adolescent model of well-being, which advocated a multidimensional model using the concept of effective functioning. Fraillon asserted that positive psychological definitions generally encompass the following terms: the active pursuit of well-being; and a balance of attributes, namely, positive affect or life satisfaction and prosocial behaviour.

The measure of student well-being is the degree to which a student is functioning effectively in the home, school and community. A comparative overview of children’s well-being in rich countries by the UNICEF Office of Research (2013) has identified five dimensions of well-being in children’s lives: material well-being; health and safety; education; behaviours and risks; and housing and environment. Fraillon (2004) recommended including two additional subdimensions of the intrapersonal – in which there are the nine subdimensions of autonomy, emotional regulation, resilience, self-efficacy, self-esteem, spirituality, curiosity, engagement and mastery orientation – and the interpersonal – in which there are the four subdimensions of communicative efficacy, empathy, acceptance and connectedness. Here well-being is defined in terms of positive affect rather than the absence of distress and it has been delineated into its component elements.

Drawing on Fraillon’s definition of student well-being, the degree to which a student is functioning effectively in the school community, the Australian Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations broadened it to: ‘A sustainable state of positive mood and attitude, resilience and satisfaction with self, relationships and experiences at school’ (NSW Department of Education, 2015, p. 2). This reflects the most common characteristics in the well-being literature – namely: positive affect; resilience; satisfaction with relationships and other dimensions of one’s life; effective functioning; and the maximising of one’s potential – and these qualities are linked with coping.

Achieving well-being and a capacity to cope with life situations has been the concern of philosophers since Aristotle, who is credited with saying that ‘happiness depends upon ourselves’, which is rearticulated by Seligman. But to learn the art of human existence requires an understanding of the dynamic process that involves the interaction between one’s circums...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• List of acronyms
• 1 Positive psychology and related constructs
• 2 What is coping?
• 3 The measurement of coping
• 4 Coping: What we have learned
• 5 Family coping: Culture and context
• 6 Well-being and resilience
• 7 An intersect: Ecology, neuroscience and epigenetics
• 8 Anxiety, depression and other related conditions
• 9 Coping with diverse conditions
• 10 Adolescent risk
• 11 Learning to cope
• 12 Technology and social media: The good and the bad
• 13 Final thoughts
• Index