Building Resilience in Youth: The Penn Resiliency Program

Psychologists have been studying resilience since the 1970s to understand what enables individual to meet developmental milestones despite serious risk factors. Although early research used terms like "invincible" and "invulnerable" to describe youth who showed resilience, the current understanding is that resilience is enabled through ordinary processes, many of which are teachable. The term resilience has many definitions, but the one that guides the work of the research team that the authors are part of is: a set of processes that enables good outcomes in spite of serious threats. In this article, the authors describe the risk factors and protective factors associated with resilience; address the need for enhancing resilience in youth; describe the protective factors that their school-based intervention, the Penn Resiliency Program (PRP); targets, and review the evidence of PRP's effectiveness in preventing depression, anxiety, and externalizing behavior in youth.