The Social Determinants of Resilience: A Conceptual Framework to Integrate Psychological and Policy Research

The psychological study of resilience has increasingly underscored the need for children and families to access material and psychological resources to positively adapt to significant stress. Redistributive policies—policies that downwardly reallocate society’s social and economic resources—can offer economically disadvantaged families sustained access to these resources and mitigate the harmful impacts of adversity. This conceptual paper builds upon and integrates insights from psychological and policy research to develop a unifying multilevel resilience framework, which we call the Social Determinants of Resilience. We examine four U.S. redistributive policies that have been extensively studied for their effects on child and family outcomes as case studies: 1) Medicaid expansion; 2) the Earned Income Tax Credit; 3) childcare subsidies; and 4) Temporary Assistance for Needy Families. Informed by a scoping review of each policy, we propose that redistributive policies promote children’s resilience through three mechanisms, by: 1) increasing families’ resource and service access; 2) reducing family stress; and 3) enhancing adaptive cognitions, emotions, behaviors, and interpersonal processes that protect against the development of psychopathology and promote positive mental health outcomes. Highlighting current evidence for these resilience mechanisms as well as gaps in knowledge, we conclude by setting a multidisciplinary research agenda that can leverage this conceptual framework to advance the science on how redistributive policies enable children and families to thrive.