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The First Page: Revisiting Childhood Resilience

A young boy on a swing photographed from below against a blue sky. We only see his head and hands holding on to the swings chains. We see him from behind, his head turned to the right, his face in profile. he clearly enjoys the swing.

THE FIRST PAGE

Revisiting Childhood Resilience Through Marginalised
and Displaced Voices

by Wendy Sims-Schouten

25 March 2025

The First Page presents the first page of books that are launched as part of the IAS Book Launch Programme. On 1 April 2025 Wendy Sims-Schouten will launch her new book Revisiting Childhood Resilience Through Marginalised and Displaced Voices, the result of ten years of research and publications around childhood resilience. Sims-Schouten draws upon data collected from and co-produced with children, young people and adults from marginalised, disadvantaged and displaced communities and highlights the transformative potential of stories told by marginalised and displaced children, past and present.

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Introduction: counter-voices of resilience

Be more resilient!

While completing my PhD, back in 2004/2005, I taught psychology in a number of local secondary schools in the Southwest of England. On one occasion, after explaining that I saw myself as an advocate for wellbeing, two boys came up to me. They told me they had been the unfortunate focus of bullying for a number of years, always outside the school, at the end of the day, when other kids threw rocks at them calling them the ‘nerdy twins’. I asked if they had addressed this with other teachers (this was my first session with them) and they said they had, but were told to ‘be more resilient’, and that they were ‘big, tall boys’, plus there were two of them, so surely, they could deal with this themselves. I took the bullying issue to one of the Assistant Heads, who was overseeing safeguarding and pastoral care in the school. Two days later, the Assistant Head approached me and told me that he had caught kids in the act of throwing rocks at the boys after school and had dealt with the issue. The boys also approached me, saying that following the intervention of the Assistant Head, the bullying had stopped, thanking me for taking this further.

This experience made me ponder the concept of ‘resilience’, how it is used and viewed. Years later, when embarking on a study of bullying in schools, I was once again confronted with this, when teachers were discussing resilience in terms of ‘manning up’ (Sims-Schouten and Edwards, 2016). Moreover, I observed flawed perceptions of resilience in other settings, such as social work and social care, and in practice with children from marginalised, disadvantaged and displaced communities (e.g., Sims-Schouten and Hayden, 2017; Sims-Schouten, 2021a;
Sims-Schouten and Thapa, 2023). For example, between 2017 and 2022 I worked with a charity supporting children, young people and adults …

WENDY SIMS-SCHOUTEN is Professor of Interdisciplinary Psychology and Head of UCL Arts & Sciences.

The book launch will take place jointly with Eleanore Hargreaves, Denise Buchanan and Laura Quick who will launch their book Children’s Life-Histories in Primary Schools: Imagining Schooling as a Positive Experience on 1 April 2025 at the Institute of Advanced Studies. More information.

Lead Image: Detail of photo by Myles Tan via Unsplash

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