Nursery World - Resilience

In an edited extract from her new book, Building a Resilient Workforce in the Early Years, Helen Garnett explains what resilience is and how staff can achieve it

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Resilience is defined as the capacity to recover quickly from difficulties. The ability to become more resilient increases when people are supported, respected and valued. Similarly, people become less resilient when support is scarce, respect is lacking and they see themselves as having little or no value.

The neurobiology of resilience shows how toxic stress, defined as the ‘excessive or prolonged activation of the physiologic stress response systems in absence of the buffering protection afforded by stable, responsive relationships’, can affect our early development through the production of stress hormones, such as cortisol. Under prolonged stress, elevations in cortisol levels ‘can alter the function of a number of neural systems, suppress the immune response, and even change the architecture of regions in the brain that are essential for learning and memory’.

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