Force Mutlipliers
Families serve as a force multiplier with unique capacities, resources, strength,, and resilience
pillar 4
Video: the Principle in one minute
When solutions build on a family’s unique sources of strength, identity, and resilience, families can overcome challenges together.
What this means
Explore
-
Remarkable strength and fortitude can be found within a family, and across cultures families often turn to one another for strength in similar ways.
-
Even amid adversity, hardship, and trauma, families can rally together, draw upon one another, and often emerge with increased love, purpose, and resilience needed to face the future.
-
Because children and youth do not function in isolation, family support provides unique sources of strength and stability.
Why it matters
Explore
-
Strong families can provide a protective shield around children by buffering them against negative outcomes and giving sustained support through hardship.
-
When policymakers focus on children and youth apart from parents and caregivers, solutions fail to encompass the family ecosystem and can miss the resources, strengths, and resilience found within families.
-
Acknowledging family strengths is central to family literacy because it enables educators, practitioners, and policymakers to view families as a force multiplier and informing more holistic approaches to education, research, and policy.
Applying this principle
Explore
-
Use a strengths-based, family-centered lens that starts by identifying family capacities, coping resources, cohesion, and support networks.
-
Design education, research, and policy that includes parents, caregivers, and extended family rather than isolating children from the family ecosystem.
-
Translate strengths frameworks into practice by recognizing shared belief systems, sources of hope, cultural or religious practices, and pooled resources, then building solutions on those assets.
Across cultures, families turn to one another for strength, often rallying through hardship and emerging with greater purpose and resilience needed to face the future.
The logic chain
- Across diverse cultures, families bear striking similarities in how they turn to one another for strength.
- Many studies find that, even amid adversity, hardship, and trauma, families can rally together, draw on one another, and often emerge with increased love, purpose, and resilience needed to face the future.
- Thus, strong families provide a protective shield around children, giving them unique sources of strength and support and buffering them against negative outcomes.
- Because children and youth do not function in isolation, solutions that focus on children apart from parents can fail to account for the full family ecosystem and may insufficiently acknowledge the resources, strength, and resilience found within families.
- When responses to complex societal challenges build upon a family’s unique sources of strength, understanding, identity, and resilience, families can move from powerlessness to empowerment and overcome seemingly insurmountable challenges together.
Video: Strong families in conflict-affected areas
Refugee Research
Strong families can be key predictors of resilience among children and youth exposed to serious adversity. Reserach by humanitarian psychologists finds that families can rally through adversity and emerge with increased love, purpose, and resilience needed to face the future.
Ask the 'family question'
-
Where does family cohesion and functioning shape outcomes here?
-
What strengthens stable family life in this context, and what undermines it?
-
Which incentives, institutions, or cultural pressures affect family stability and parenting?
-
What happens when children lack the protective shield of a strong family, and why?
-
What intergenerational supports are present, and what is missing?
-
What would change if strong, stable families were treated as a central variable in analysis?
family influences are everywhere
strong families are essential
everyone is shaped by their family
families are a force multiplier
world religions share beliefs
Give Today
$5
$10
$50
$250
$500
Other