The Everyday Stress Resilience Hypothesis: A Reparatory Sensitivity and the Development of Coping and Resilience

Abstract

Resilience is often associated with extreme trauma or overcoming extraordinary odds. This way of thinking about resilience leaves most of the ontogenetic picture a mystery. In the following review we put forth the Everyday Stress Resilience Hypothesis, in which resilience is analysed from a systems perspective and seen as a process of regulating everyday life stressors. Successful regulation accumulates into regulatory resilience, which emerges during early development from successful coping with the inherent stress in typical interactions. These quotidian stressful events lead to activation of behavioural and physiological systems. Stress that is effectively resolved in the short run and with reiteration over the long term increases children’s, as well as adults’, capacity to cope with more intense stressors. Infants, however, lack the regulatory capacities to take on this task by themselves. Therefore, through communicative and regulatory processes during infant–adult interactions, we demonstrate that the roots of regulatory resilience originate in infants’ relationships with their care givers and that maternal sensitivity can help or hinder the growth of resilience.