Celebrating the “good-enough families”: Family challenges and resilience during global adversity

Abstract

Families have historically been and remain the most significant units of human existence (Montefiore, 2022). The recognition of the families' paradoxical position is as old as the beginning of family science. Although families are relational systems potentially providing great joy, support, and security, families are also where significant pain, loss, and trauma can originate from (Lebow, 2023; Walsh, 2021). Family science has reflected this paradox. Historically, following an Hegelian dialectic of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis, family science started by examining the deficits and identifying vulnerability and risk factors (thesis). The thesis was followed by a perspective shift that had scholars looking for the systems' strengths by addressing resources and protective factors (antithesis), and it has now arrived at a more mature and complex outlook, where elements from both traditions are not only acknowledged but also honored (a synthesis in working progress).

When the pandemic, a major global adverse event, hit, there was little wonder in how both these contrasting visions of family were observed. On the one side, there were stories in the news about family separation and loss (e.g., families of essential workers being split up, older family members in reclusion and dying alone), apprehension about growing conflict and violence, especially towards women and children, and concerns about survival for those who were laid-off or lost their jobs. On the other side, there were stories about families reconnecting with each other, being able to spend more time together (e.g., new fathers at home for a baby's first months) rediscovering the joys of nature walks, board games, and of the slow baking of bread from starter-dough. The fear of families succumbing to the pandemic coexisted with their glorification as a sanctuary in troubled times. Because this split was more evident in messages from mass media, family science was not immune to this polarization (Lebow, 2023). Yet, the field had already evolved greatly and since early on in the pandemic scholars have called for a more nuanced, integrated, and dynamic view of families living through unprecedented adversity (e.g., Walsh, 2020).

The will to transcend dichotomous thinking about families opened up an opportunity to revisit Donald Winnicott's concept of “the good enough mother” (Winnicott, 1953, p. 92). Being as generative as a good idea can be, this term from the 1950s seemed to be particularly useful to apply to families in the post-pandemic world. Winnicott (1953) brilliantly observed that the mother adapted to the needs and growth of the baby and that, with time, it was necessary that she adapted less and less as the baby grew increasingly able to deal with the mother's small failures and tolerate the results of frustration. This attitude can be seen as a first lesson in resilience, as the mother/caregiver provides the child with a growing ability to thrive in an imperfect world. Likewise, families navigating through the pandemic ought to be neither demonized nor glorified but understood in their capacity to provide enough security, support, and stability in the face of great uncertainty. There is, simultaneously, a lot and only so much a family system can do in a situation of adversity affecting all systemic levels (Ungar, 2021). As guest editors of this special issue, we endorse this position of complexity: families' resilience cannot be seen as result of either their merit or their fault. Instead, the family's middle position in a multisystemic context allows for hope in recognizing their potential and agency, but also for humbleness and pragmatism in observing the contextual forces they must deal with Allen and Henderson, (2022). As Lebow (2023) pointed out, families are coping the best they can in these troubled times, and an informed view of families encompasses both their challenges and resilience. We, thus, consider that “good-enough families” ought to be celebrated. This is our leitmotiv for introducing the special issue International Perspectives on Families' Challenges and Resilience during Global Adversity. While during its initial stages we envisioned several possibilities for this special issue, the end result allowed us to think of families during global adversity in a different, more complex way and form new ideas that emerged not from the individual papers but from the issue as a whole (Relvas, 2023).

The present issue gathers seven articles and four commentaries by 16 scholars and practitioners based in eight countries: Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, New Zealand, Portugal, Spain, United Kingdom, and United States. In this introductory article, we develop four main themes that arose from the integration of the special issue papers: global adversity, adversity in context, resilience in context, and international perspectives. The papers are used to illustrate a brief discussion around these themes. To begin, we introduce the guest editors and tell the story of how the idea for this issue came about.

Although most people seem to remember when the COVID-19 pandemic started, the same does not appear to apply to the memory of when it was over. The World Health Organization declared the end of COVID-19 as a public health emergency in May 5, 2023 (WHO, 2023). Yet, this declaration was not met with celebratory relief or even given much attention in the stage of world news. In fact, although societies progressively came out of lockdown and eased restriction at different paces, adversity kept coming in. In early 2024, as we write this editorial, communities are dealing, in the aftermath of the pandemic, with already known adversities aggravated by the COVID-19 (e.g., economic recession fears, climate change, and divisive politics), adversities attributed to the pandemic (e.g., mental health, especially in vulnerable groups) and with new unexpected adversities (e.g., high-profile long-lasting wars in Ukraine and Middle East). Of particular importance to family science is the overall pattern that has been recently shaped, a configuration of multiple losses in an environment of heightened uncertainty. There were tangible losses, such as the loss of loved ones, of the possibility of saying goodbye as they were dying, loss of jobs, of regular school and work environment, and of social interactions. Alongside these, came another type of losses which were more difficult to identify and acknowledge, such as the loss of normalcy, of hopes, dreams, and of taken for granted worldviews (Boss, 2024; Walsh, 2020). Interestingly, as the pandemic evolved, the loss of guidance might also have been felt as a loss by some. A Welsh study (Bangor University, 2023) found that individuals reporting higher levels of compliance with COVID rules during the pandemic assessed in 2020 had lower levels of current well-being 3 years later. The researchers hypothesized that intense public health messages during the initial stages of the pandemic were followed by no messaging campaign to help people transition back to normality, which may have been detrimental to a specific group of people who retained anxiety and prevention behaviors.

Ambiguous loss theory is a valuable framework for understanding these experiences. In her opening commentary for the special issue, Pauline Boss (2024) discusses how global family suffering is causing fear, anger, and anxiety not due to deficits or pathology in individual or family systems but to what she calls an unrelenting context of ambiguity. Ambiguous loss, which has been useful in studying specific phenomena, is now relevant for an overarching understanding of the current global experience of loss amid uncertainty. In this special issue, three papers selected the COVID-pandemic as the main adversity (Ceberio, 2024; Medina Centeno, 2024; Pietromonaco & Overall, 2024), a fourth paper chose the war in Ukraine (Vetere & Shimwell, 2024), and a fifth paper examined the wildfires and climate change (Ferreira et al., 2024). Two papers did not focus on a specific type of adversity; however, one examined ways in which families could guard relational security when faced with adversities threatening attachment relationships (Berástegui & Pitillas, 2024). The other paper examined how dyadic bicultural competence could be a resource for couples in the face of increasing transnational migration, an event that brings challenges to families embedded in two or more cultures (Hendershot & Johnson, 2024).

Across studies, the impact of adversity was described at the different systemic levels: communities, whole-families, couples, and parent–children and individuals. Four papers included overviews of selected studies showing how the pandemic impacted families and communities (Ceberio, 2024; Medina Centeno, 2024) and couples (Pietromonaco & Overall, 2024), and how wildfires affected families and communities (Ferreira et al., 2024). Two articles focused on the experience of security, with authors using the attachment framework. One paper observed the experiences of professionals working with families that are vulnerable or face adversity (Berástegui & Pitillas, 2024) and the other explored the joining of Ukraine families and their UK hosts during the involuntary dislocation crisis (Vetere & Shimwell, 2024). The attachment theoretical framework initially developed by John Bowlby around the time of another global adversity, World War II, is especially relevant as the attachment system is activated in threatening conditions, such as the ones that global adversity provoked in the initial acute stages of the pandemic and the war in Ukraine crises. In line with these authors who contributed to a systemic outlook on attachment security, we suggest that revisiting Byng-Hall's (1995) concept of family as a secure base can be a fruitful to guide future research on families and global adversity. According to Byng-Hall (1995), when families provide a secure base, a network of care is available for family members of all ages so that everyone feels secure to explore, safe in the knowledge that support is available when needed. Byng-Hall's pivotal indication that attachments relationships need to be protected and not undermined is especially pertinent in a global context where stability and security can be perceived as scarce.

There is no such thing as a family, only a family and a context. This could be the 21st century systemic nod to Winnicott's (1960, 1960) famous observation that there is no such thing as a baby, only an infant in relationship with a mother. The importance of the context for family science has been long recognized, yet it is still often under acknowledged as individual or family deficits are still considered the main causes of human symptoms (Boss, 2024). The articles and commentaries in this special issue allowed for an in-depth reflection on how the impact of adversities on individuals, families, and communities and the ways in which they adapted and generated resilience were both shaped by context.

The papers in this special issue provided insight on how adversities are never a universal equalizing experience but affect systems and individuals differently according to personal and contextual factors. The papers by Medina Centeno (2024) and Vetere and Shimwell (2024) focusing on the pandemic and the war in Ukraine, respectively, reflected on how the women, especially women with young children were the ones who were more strongly impacted by these two adverse events. Medina Centeno observed how Latin America's patriarchal culture continues to have power in families, as men remain peripheral to childcare and household responsibilities. The pandemic intensified this gender inequality debt as women were burdened with working from home and attending to the demands of housebound young children. Vetere and Shimwell provided insight on the Homes for Ukraine, a UK government programme that offered to host dislocated Ukrainian mothers and their children as guests in family homes. The authors pondered how the host–guest relationships may have been disempowering especially for younger women with children, living with older hosts. This arrangement, in some cases, allowed for a sense of imbalance, whereby one person was seen as giving and generous and the other as dependent and expected to be grateful. Women, in some cases, reverted to more immature behaviors with their hosts who would sometimes represent critical and negatively perceived parental figures. Because the authors considered that the majority of hosts and guests were able to attune to one another and negotiate their differences, they advocated for a more fine-tuned preparation of the host–guest arrangements in order to provide a safe context for all involved. This seems especially important in order to avoid that a well-meaning action conducts to revictimization for these women already in vulnerable position because of age, gender, and overall lack of emotional and material resources as they fled their country for safety.

Pietromonaco and Overall (2024) purposefully looked at the interaction between pandemic and context for understanding couples' adaptation. They presented a revised theoretical model explaining how sociocultural contexts, namely country/culture and race/ethnicity may impact pandemic-related stressors and how these affect dyadic relationship processes. This paper stressed how pre-existing individual, relational, and contextual factors can be exacerbated by the pandemic, an effect not limited to the initial COVID-19 crisis but likely to be extended in time as stressors, such as economic impact, may become chronic for some couples. The focus on couples is especially relevant as it is legitimate to expect that they are key cores within the family system for how adversities are filtered and experienced. The attachment security generated by the couple's relationship reverberates across the family system making them an important emotional unit (e.g., Mikulincer & Shaver, 2012). Also, parents make up the executive subsystem of the family (Minuchin, 1974), with a great responsibility in family decision making. Whether the couples remain as such throughout the family life cycle or transition into another type of relationship, such as being co-parents, the bond between the architects of the family (Satir, 1964) is of paramount importance to support, especially during adversity.

Resilience is a widely accepted framework to understand adaptation in the context of adversity (Ungar, 2021; Walsh, 2021). Five out of seven main papers used this theoretical concept, and all seven explored ways in which families can cope with adversity, our next topic. In line with recent theoretical developments, resilience was mostly conceptualized as a dynamic process in the sense that it can be learned, however not in the sense of riding a bicycle type of skill. Instead, resilience must be revisited and transformed throughout life as what and who is resilient in one context may not be so in other setting or developmental context (Walsh, 2021). Resilience, like adversity, is bound to meaning construed by individuals, families, and communities (Ceberio, 2024; Walsh, 2021). Ceberio (2024) noted this fluidity when discussing the role of resilience guardians in the family, who are defined as individuals who take up resilience mentoring in the family when required. These roles can be either fixed or temporary depending on the situations and matters the family is facing, where a specific member could be more suitable than the others at a specific time.

The dynamic nature of resilience was also acknowledged via the tension between a family's experience of stability and change. Although the most visible side of resilience seems to be the focus on the system's capacity to adapt to changes and change accordingly, it is equally important that systems harness their already existing strengths and resources. When faced with unexpected or unwanted crises, individuals and systems must quickly reorganize, integrate new information, and experiment with innovative solutions not in their previous repertoire (Ungar, 2021). Resilient trajectories of families amid global diversity have been built on two types of processes that co-evolve together in a spiral movement of continuous change (Bateson, 1979). Families relied on both morphogenesis, their capacity to change as a system, and morphostasis, their ability to preserve stability. These two processes were evident, for instance, in the Homes for Ukraine programme showing the need of both hosts and guests having to negotiate rules and accommodate to one another, but also keeping what was important for each of them (Vetere & Shimwell, 2024). For Ukrainians, this was achieved through the local Ukraine community organizing meetings and get-togethers that allowed to celebrate rituals, such as birthdays and anniversaries. A similar interplay between stability and change was observed in communities affected by wildfires. Ferreira et al. (2024) identified how these communities proactively engaged in actions to deal with the aftermath of the fires, but also resorting to what was already meaningful to them as group, such as traditional celebrations and festivals and other community events where members could reconnect. Finally, this dynamic feature was implicit in the concept of dyadic bicultural competence developed by Hendershot and Johnson (2024) in the context of migrant couples, defined as the couples' collective facility in navigating both dominant and heritage cultural contexts. High dyadic bicultural competence, honoring both the old and the new in migrants' lives, potentially allows the couple to cope with a wider range of culturally based challenges. The incoming empirical research in this topic will illuminate how this systemic competence can influence individual and couple outcomes and how these may be moderated by specific sociocultural contexts.

In addition to its dynamic nature, resilience was also conceptualized as a relational construct (Ceberio, 2024; Walsh, 2021). Resilience was once considered an individual trait that made some thrive although others perished, a limiting view that offered little but to paralyze families and professionals working with them. Nowadays, resilience is agreed to be a multisystemic phenomenon nested in relationships (Ungar, 2021). In this issue, an interesting indicator of this relational conceptualization is the use of language that implies the systemic nature of constructs such as resilience or competence, namely family resilience (Ceberio, 2024; Ferreira et al., 2024), community resilience (Ferreira et al., 2024), attachment resilience (Berástegui & Pitillas, 2024) and bicultural competence (Hendershot & Johnson, 2024).

A multisystemic view on resilience posits that when challenged by adversity, resilience results from the response of not one but several interconnected systems plus their complex interactions (Ungar, 2021). Accordingly, the articles in this special issue offered insights on how responses to global adversity aiming at family resilience would be located at different systemic levels (Relvas, 2023). As Berástegui and Pitillas (2024) poignantly pointed out, families living in highly insecure contexts struggle to offer security to their children. In order to promote security for families facing adversity, there are several social nodes to consider such as informal, formal, and specialized networks (Berástegui & Pitillas, 2024). Three papers focused on the importance of specialized networks. Medina Centeno (2024) offered a relevant macro view on the importance of considering the influence of the wider social structures (e.g., patriarchy, racism, classism, and hyper consumerism) for the conceptualization of pathology, with clear implications for professionals working with families. He called out for the responsibility of these professionals to generate an involvement of everyone in the open negotiation of tacit cultural meanings that interfere with family and individual well-being. In a strong position, Medina Centeno (2024) advocated for the need to become indignant and situate personal and family malaises in context, in order to re-establish a fruitful dialogue of family and community solidarity. Vetere and Shimwell (2024) discussed the importance of intervention/mediation by professionals in the process of hosting war refugees. According to these authors, it is legitimate to expect that participants hold different expectations of how they ought to live together as hosts and guests, underpinned by their respective and socially attuned manners of emotional expression. For the ones involved in this arrangement, the need to create a relational context for safer and more open expression and communication of needs may require the mediation of a specialized third party. For hosts, they suggest that online workshops facilitated by professionals with a background in mental health and family systems checking in on how family members are coping with hosting would be highly beneficial. For guests, information on mental health and wellbeing and access to mental health services would be important to allow room for them to talk about their losses and their overall experiences in the host country. Finally, Berástegui and Pitillas (2024) introduced the figure of the family keyworker, a well-trained family support professional (e.g., a psychologist, social worker, and educator) that establishes a consistent, attachment-based relationship with a family that has accumulated adversity and/or trauma. The authors described how, based on an attachment perspective, these professionals are key links of a security chain that aims at promoting attachment resilience in families. The transmission of experiences of care occurs at different system levels: from institutions (offering support and supervision) to professionals, from professionals to families, and from families to children.

An example of the combination of informal, formal, and specialized networks arose in the paper of Ferreira et al. (2024) on family and community resilience amid wildfires. Their findings showed how after the fires, local informal multifamily groups were formed in some communities, allowing a space to share accounts and emotions regarding the disaster, mobilize rebuilding efforts, mourn the losses, and build collective stories of resilience and hope. In addition, there were groups of professionals, such as firefighters and other experts that could be invited to participate in prevention efforts ran by local organizations. This contributed to communities' wildfire preparedness; by promoting knowledge and training and fostering social bonds, the members of communities could be perceived as collaborators with the specialists' efforts.

When we launched the call for this special issue, there was a purposeful appeal for the inclusion of diverse international perspectives on family resilience and challenges. Although the field of family science, including theory, research, and practice, has greatly evolved to become an international forum, there is still a lot to be learned about family science in international context. The need to carry out studies in diverse contexts and to be able to map which principles and findings go beyond culture and which ones are culturally idiosyncratic will be certainly in the forefront of family research in the following years (Lebow, 2023). For instance, as Pietromonaco and Overall (2024) pointed out in this issue, much of the research on the effects of pandemic for couples was conducted in the US and other Western countries, with more studies needing to address how couples in sociocultural contexts are dealing with the ramifications of this adversity.

Moreover, the influence of context transcends the phenomena itself, as it is relevant not only to understand families, but also to understand how scholars, in different cultural settings, theorize and conceptualize research on family topics. The building up of this special issue, which gathered two guest editors from Portugal, an editor from the US, 16 authors from eight countries and many reviewers with different backgrounds, was a unique opportunity to reflect on the richness and diversity of influences that came together and also on the trials that emerged. Interestingly, amid the diversity, theories were a mutual compass that allowed for a shared understanding by authors and reviewers involved in this special issue (Relvas, 2023). In line with tends to happen with contemporary theories (Allen & Henderson, 2022), when thinking of global adversity authors used old theories to explain new phenomena (e.g., Boss, 2024; Ceberio, 2024; Medina Centeno, 2024; Vetere and Shimwell, 2024) and also expanded them by introducing changes that permitted to explain new realities in a more complex way (e.g., Berástegui & Pitillas, 2024; Hendershot & Johnson, 2024; Pietromonaco & Overall, 2024). Yet, although theories were a common ground for colleagues from different backgrounds, the specifics of their application in the field (praxis) were the stage for some welcomed scholarly uproar. Although we, as scholars, tend to agree that theories must be useful in both explaining and ameliorating the lives of real families (Allen & Henderson, 2022), the ways in that it must happen are a subject of ongoing debate. The most vivid example of this was the article by Berástegui and Pitillas (2024) who proposed the use of an attachment framework to both support and be applied by family keyworkers, a professional figure that exists (or a proxy) in some countries, but it is not universal (e.g., Berástegui & Pitillas, 2024; Lordello, 2024; Puhlman, 2024).

Literature is consensual about attachment being a useful theory for understanding families who have experienced trauma and adversity but how does that translate in the daily practice of professionals? This article sparked a very interesting debate about the limits and the potential of the application of attachment theory and attachment-based techniques by professionals who are not clinically trained. We invited two scholars who are also therapists, Silvia Lordello from Brazil and Daniel Puhlman from the US to discuss this topic, knowing that their cultural, social, academic, and clinical contexts would allow them to view this issue from different perspectives. On one hand, there was concern for the ability of the family keyworkers to use sensitive tools with families in vulnerable positions: how would this work and what ought to be out of bounds for those who counsel and work with families but are not clinically trained? On the other hand, there was the argument of democratizing knowledge and allowing for families in disadvantaged communities to benefit directly and indirectly, via professional supervision, of a well-established framework. Berástegui and Pitillas (2024) provided a response to both commentaries, where they not only clarified some specific points in their paper but also revisited it in the light of new perspectives offered by the two scholars. We consider that this format, an article followed by a discussion of two or more international schools from different backgrounds and a response from the original authors, can be a good avenue to bring more diversity and visibility to academic discussions. The personal and scientific contexts are undoubtedly sources that inspire a worldview and allow scholars to become aware of relevant phenomena to look at with scientific lenses—in that sense they are great lookout points. At the same time, contexts can also be limiting, and note that Medina Centeno (2024) urged scholars to leave their specializing caves. It is essential to be genuinely curious and audacious to go beyond and be willing to learn what we do not yet know (Bateson, 2004).

In conclusion, we started this editorial by celebrating “good enough families”, acknowledging both the impact families suffered during the last 3 years of global adversity and their agency and ability to transform themselves and the systems around them during uncertain times. Uncertainty, as Edgar Morin recalls, is not new and has always accompanied the great human adventure (Ginori, 2020). Yet, this critical historical time is a noteworthy chance to renew thinking on its echoes for individuals, families, and local and global communities. A reflection on the seven papers and four commentaries that make up this special issue allowed us to identify the plural meanings of global adversity, and the relevance of contextualizing both adversity and the ways in which families deal with it, namely through building resilience. Lastly, in our role as international guest editors ourselves, we contemplated the means by which family science can grow more diverse and complex. We hope this issue propels scholars to continue to reflect on how context matters for both today's families and for scholars who theorize about, research, and work with them.