Critical model of resilience in children and youth from a Latin American polycrisis context based on a mixed-methods study

Abstract

This study proposes a critical resilience model for children and youth in Latin American polycrisis contexts, marked by overlapping adversities including poverty, environmental degradation, armed conflict, and institutional abandonment. In this cross-sectional, sequential mixed-methods study, we combined standardized instruments with culturally grounded focusgroups in Indigenous and Afro-descendant communities in Colombia's Chocó region (n = 187, aged 7-29). Quantitative findings reveal a paradox: high resilience scores despite severe structural deprivation-food insecurity, coercive parenting, violence exposure. Regression analysis identified both risk and protective factors, highlighting complex relationships between adversity and adaptive responses. Narratives emphasized resilience not as passive adjustment but as collective resistance, spiritual balance, and political agency, what participants termed "to live is to resist." We therefore distinguish resilience from resistance, political agency, and habituated endurance. Rather than rejecting resilience per se, we critique its depoliticized use: in contexts of polycrisis, standardized resilience scores may register persistence under structural harm without adequately differentiating flourishing from normalized suffering. This convergence challenges dominant individualistic resilience conceptions and supports a relational, culturally situated framework informed by Latin American critical theory. Together, the findings support a relational, culturally situated, and justice-oriented understanding of resilience and call for mental health strategies that strengthen collective life while addressing the structural roots of suffering.