Familias Fuertes: Family Resilience Among Latinos

Family life is vital to most Latinos. Family resilience thus is an important perspective for family scholars working with Latino families to adopt because of its focus on wellness and adaptability, in effect, punctuating the strengths common among Latino families. Toward the latter part of the twentieth century, conversations among family scientists and family therapists more and more included the concept of resilience. Researchers began examining family dynamics that provided a more accurate portrayal of family life, as well as in terms of providing professional support to families. Wolin and Wolin (1993) discussed both the “damage model” and the “challenge model” as they pertained to prevention and intervention, highlighting the significance of identifying and extracting the strengths families possess. Elevating aspects of strength and resilience is particularly important for working with families, who at first glance may be viewed as characterized mainly by needs and deficits, often an inaccurate and skewed portrayal. A strengths perspective views the glass as “half-full” rather than “half-empty.” This is significant because families may present themselves in clinical settings as primarily having deficits rather than as possessing strengths and assets and living everyday life where negative and positive elements intersect.