An Examination of the Cascading Resilience Model and Family Resilience

Abstract

The concept of resilience has been widely studied for decades. Recent streams of resilience research have focused on relational and environmental factors important for understanding risk and resilience beyond individual traits (Masten, Lucke, Nelson & Stallworthy, 2021). This systems perspective of resilience is critical when considering family resilience. Family resilience is the ability of a family, as a functional system, to withstand and overcome adversities and stress (Walsh, 2016a). Transactional processes among family members, as well as challenges faced by individual members of the family, impact the functioning of the family as a unit. Around the world, parenting programs are being developed and employed to promote positive parenting techniques and improve child well-being and family outcomes. The Cascading Resilience Model (CRM; Doty, Davis, & Arditti, 2017) is a theoretical model explaining how parenting programs can create cascades of resilience that spill over into a variety of unintended systems, including the family system. This model highlights theories such as Barbara Fredrickson’s broaden and build theory (2004), and social capital theory, as mechanisms by which parental skills create cascades of resilience. Despite the CRM’s strong theoretical underpinnings, it has yet to be empirically tested with a community sample. Therefore, the present study tests the CRM’s proposed pathways for how parenting qualities can lead to family resilience. Self-report data from 295 self-identified parents was collected on parental self-efficacy, positive emotions, coping capacity, social supports, and family resilience. Structural equation modelling was used to test the CRM, and showed that the proposed pathways of the CRM did not fully explain the data collected. However, adding a direct pathway from parental positive emotion to family resilience significantly improved model fit, highlighting the importance of considering parental emotion in interventions to improve family resilience.