Adolescents' Precocious and Developmentally Appropriate Contributions to Their Families' Well‐Being and Resilience in Five Countries

• Author: Michael Ungar,Nora Didkowsky,Linda Theron
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1741-3729.2010.00645.x
• Published date: 01 April 2011
• Date: 01 April 2011

MICHAEL UNGAR Dalhousie University

LINDA THERON North-West University*

NORA DIDKOWSKY Dalhousie University**

Adolescents’ Precocious and Developmentally

Appropriate Contributions to Their Families’

Well-Being and Resilience in Five Countries

An exploratory qualitative study of 16 disadvan-

taged youth in 5 countries suggests that making

both precocious and developmentally appropri-

ate contributions to their families’ well-being

is advantageous to adolescents coping with

chronic adversity. All youth were known to be

doing well (as identified by community advisors)

and showed patterns of contribution that pro-

vided instrumental support to parents, siblings,

and extended family members in culturally rel-

evant ways. Data were gathered using in-depth

interviews, photo-elicitation, and the filming of

1 full day in the life of each youth. Youth

reported that their experiences of precocious

(synonymous with processes of adultification)

and developmentally appropriate contribution

facilitate their access to resources that nur-

ture and sustain their well-being. This process

School of Social Work, Dalhousie University, 3201

LeMarchant Street, Halifax, Canada B3H 3P8 (michael.

ungar@dal.ca).

*School of Education, School of Educational Sciences, Vaal

Triangle Campus, North-West University, South Africa.

**Faculty of Graduate Studies, Dalhousie University,

Halifax, Canada.

Key Words: adultification, cultural diversity, family

relationships, parentification, precocious contribution,

resilience, youth.

of contribution is discussed as one aspect of

resilience. Both youth and their caregivers

coconstructed acts of contribution as helpful

to young people’s psychosocial development in

contexts where youth are exposed to multiple

risks.

When Jurkovic, Morrell, and Casey (2001)

examined the biographies of political and cul-

tural elites such as President Lyndon Baines

Johnson and Marlene Dietrich in the United

States, they found that children’s instrumen-

tal and emotional contributions to the welfare

of their parents (parentification) was reported

as both a common and worthwhile experi-

ence. Controversially, Jurkovic et al. concluded:

‘‘Parentification appears endemic to family life.

It is not tantamount to pathology and, indeed,

frequently characterizes adaptive family rela-

tionships, particularly during stressful periods’’

(p. 130, emphasis added). Although a parent’s

dependence on his or her child may threaten a

child’s psychosocial development (a weakened

sense of security, narcissism, etc.; McMahon &

Luthar, 2007; Peris, Goeke-Morey, Cummings,

& Emery, 2008), the ascendance of the child

in the family hierarchy can also influence pos-

itively a child’s potential for career and life

success when families are poorly resourced or

Family Relations 60 (April 2011): 231 – 246 231

DOI:10.1111/j.1741-3729.2010.00645.x

232 Family Relations

under stress (Burton, 2007; Hooper, Marotta, &

Lanthier, 2008; Rama & Richter, 2007).

This need for contextual sensitivity when

understanding children’s development is also

typical of studies of resilience (Rutter, 2008).

Although an aspect of positive youth devel-

opment such as the opportunity to make a

contribution (Lerner, 2006) predicts prosocial-

ity for all young people, what that contribution

looks like and its function as protective pro-

cesses depends on the level of adversity a family

experiences (Ungar, 2011). In affluent coun-

tries, processes that invert parent-child roles are

considered damaging to a youth’s psychosocial

development (Cohen, 2001). When contextual

factors are accounted for, however, children’s

contributions may change from a sign of fam-

ily dysfunction to a valued source of support

to a family in need (Jurkovic, 1997; Jurkovic

et al., 2001).

The nature of young people’s contributions

to their families and the impact these have on

their capacity to cope with adversity have not

been well studied in different adverse contexts.

Our research aimed to provide a critical look

at children’s precocious and developmentally

appropriate contributions within their families,

whether those contributions invert, flatten, or

maintain parent-child hierarchies. Qualitative

data (videos of a day in the life of each

adolescent, photo-elicitation, and transcripts of

interviews) were used to explore how atypical

family roles can help immediate and extended

family members fulfill child-care and household

management responsibilities. The use of a

constructivist grounded theory approach to the

study’s design and data analysis (Charmaz,

2006) helped us to explore the localized,

culturally divergent understandings of these

contribution patterns and their relationship to

resilience.

To investigate both common and unique

aspects of young people’s contributions to

their families in different cultures and con-

texts and to avoid Eurocentric bias, we used

data from an exploratory qualitative study of

both homogeneous and heterogeneous patterns

of resilience among 16 youth in five countries.

All participants were identified by local advisory

committees of researchers and human service

professionals as having been exposed to chronic

adversity but still ‘‘doing well.’’ This combi-

nation of exposure to adversity and perceived

positive functioning on age-appropriate tasks

(e.g., attending school, maintaining relationships

with peers and family members, and resisting

drugs or high-risk sexual activity) was used as

selection criteria for youth whose lives demon-

strate patterns of positive functioning associated

with resilience (Ungar et al., 2007) The cultural

pluralism of the research team was also impor-

tant during the analysis of the data, facilitating

debate over what is and is not a sign of preco-

cious contribution given different cultural norms

regarding an adolescent’s transition to adult-like

roles within his or her family. In this regard, our

research mirrors that of Wickrama, Merten, and

Elder (2005), who have shown that the impact

on adolescents’ mental health of precocious life

events such as early sexual intercourse, mar-

riage, or cohabitation; home leaving; and high

school dropout are mediated by racial differ-

ences and community disadvantage. Although

our focus here is on aspects of precocious devel-

opment that occur while the child is within his or

her family, cultural and community factors were

still expected to influence protective processes

associated with resilience.

For the purpose of this study, resilience is

defined as a social ecological construct based on

the work by Ungar (2008, 2011). Resilience is

understood as including two processes. First,

resilience is a sequence of events (such as

making a contribution to another’s welfare)

whereby individuals use internal and external

developmental assets in situations of exposure

to acute or chronic adversity to navigate to

new resources that sustain well-being. A child

is showing resilience when he or she is able

to access experiences that bolster assets. In this

study, availing one’s self of opportunities to

contribute was believed to enhance self-esteem,

secure positive and supportive intrafamilial rela-

tionships, and create more secure living arrange-

ments. Second, resilience is the capacity of the

individual’s social and physical ecology to pro-

vide these resources in culturally meaningful

ways, with the youth actively negotiating for

what he or she needs to achieve functional

benchmarks of successful development that are

locally relevant. A social ecological interpre-

tation of resilience emphasizes the importance

of the young person’s culture and the cocon-

struction of meaning that determines which

experiences in specific contexts will be helpful

to a youth’s psychosocial development. In this

regard, this definition of resilience emphasizes

that resilience is not only a process associated