Celebrating the “good‐enough families”: Family challenges and resilience during global adversity

Families have historically been and remain the most significant units of human existence (Montefiore, 2022). The recognition of the families' paradoxical position is as old as the beginning of family science. Although families are relational systems potentially providing great joy, support, and security, families are also where significant pain, loss, and trauma can originate from (Lebow, 2023; Walsh, 2021). Family science has reflected this paradox. Historically, following an Hegelian dialectic of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis, family science started by examining the deficits and identifying vulnerability and risk factors (thesis). The thesis was followed by a perspective shift that had scholars looking for the systems' strengths by addressing resources and protective factors (antithesis), and it has now arrived at a more mature and complex outlook, where elements from both traditions are not only acknowledged but also honored (a synthesis in working progress). When the pandemic, a major global adverse event, hit, there was little wonder in how both these contrasting visions of family were observed. On the one side, there were stories in the news about family separation and loss (e.g., families of essential workers being split up, older family members in reclusion and dying alone), apprehension about growing conflict and violence, especially towards women and children, and concerns about survival for those who were laid-off or lost their jobs. On the other side, there were stories about families reconnecting with each other, being able to spend more time together (e.g., new fathers at home for a baby's first months) rediscovering the joys of nature walks, board games, and of the slow baking of bread from starter-dough. The fear of families succumbing to the pandemic coexisted with their glorification as a sanctuary in troubled times. Because this split was more evident in messages from mass media, family science was not immune to this polarization (Lebow, 2023). Yet, the field had already evolved greatly and since early on in the pandemic scholars have called for a more nuanced, integrated, and dynamic view of families living through unprecedented adversity (e.g., Walsh, 2020). The will to transcend dichotomous thinking about families opened up an opportunity to revisit Donald Winnicott's concept of "the good enough mother" (Winnicott, 1953, p. 92). Being as generative as a good idea can be, this term from the 1950s seemed to be particularly useful to apply to families in the post-pandemic world. Winnicott (1953) brilliantly observed that the mother adapted to the needs and growth of the baby and that, with time, it was necessary that she adapted less and less as the baby grew increasingly able to deal with the mother's small failures and tolerate the results of frustration. This attitude can be seen as a first lesson in resilience, as the mother/caregiver provides the child with a growing ability to thrive in an imperfect world. Likewise, families navigating through the pandemic ought to be neither demonized nor glorified but understood in their capacity to provide enough security, support, and stability in the face of great uncertainty. There is, simultaneously, a lot and only so much a family system can do in a situation of adversity affecting all systemic levels (Ungar, 2021). As guest editors of this special issue, we endorse this position of complexity: families' resilience cannot be seen as result of either their merit or their fault. Instead, the family's middle position in a multisystemic context allows for hope in recognizing their potential and agency, but also for humbleness and pragmatism in observing the contextual forces they must deal with Allen and Henderson, (2022). As Lebow (2023) pointed out, families are coping the best they can in these troubled times, and an informed view of families encompasses both their challenges and resilience. We, thus, consider that "good-enough families" ought to be celebrated. This is our leitmotiv for introducing the special issue International Perspectives on Families' Challenges and Resilience during Global Adversity. While during its initial stages we envisioned several possibilities for this special issue, the end result allowed us to think of families during global adversity in a different, more complex way and form new ideas that emerged not from the individual papers but from the issue as a whole (Relvas, 2023). The present issue gathers seven articles and four commentaries by 16 scholars and practitioners based in eight countries: Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, New Zealand, Portugal, Spain, United Kingdom, and United States. In this introductory article, we develop four main themes that arose from the integration of the special issue papers: global adversity, adversity in context, resilience in context, and international perspectives. The papers are used to illustrate a brief discussion around these themes. To begin, we introduce the guest editors and tell the story of how the idea for this issue came about. I, Ana Paula Relvas, am a professor, a clinical psychologist, and a systemic therapist. My base is the Faculty of Psychology, at the University of Coimbra, Portugal where I started my studies 47 years ago, when the first Psychology degrees came forth. Since then, family science and family therapy became the foundation of my work. I was privileged to be part of the pioneer movement of systemic thinking in Portugal. As the President of the Portuguese Society for Family Therapy I was welcomed in the European Family Therapy Association and later in the European and Latin-American Network of Systemic Schools (Relates), both propelling our work in international platforms. During this journey I have always advocated for a close relationship between systemic theory, research, and clinical practice. Today I enjoy watching how family studies became a well-established field and how systemic thinking endures as an inestimable source to understand and contribute to families in the present time. I, Carla Crespo, am an associate professor and a clinical psychologist on the Faculty of Psychology at the University of Lisbon. One of the most meaningful experiences that shaped my academic life was being welcomed as a PhD student at University of Canterbury in New Zealand by Garth Fletcher and his team, followed by working as a researcher in a country so far away geographically and culturally from my own. I was very early on alert to the ways in which the contexts of science making were both so alike and also so distinct, and to the richness that came from integrating different international perspectives. The two of us met in 2013 in Coimbra and worked together ever since in the PhD Programme in Clinical Psychology—Family Psychology and Family Interventions that Ana Paula co-founded and coordinates with three other colleagues from both our Universities. Our passion for systemic thinking and practice has led us to joint supervisions of PhD students, joint publications, memorable travels to family international meetings, and long meaningful conversations around scientific and mundane topics equally. Our experiences during the pandemic were distinct, mirroring Ceberio observation (2023) that there were as many pandemics as there were individuals on the planet. I, Ana Paula, went back to the village where I grew up and took care of older family members. Removed geographically from my offspring, I got closer to my husband and my family of origin. The pandemic saw me renovating my family home, raising ducks, polish chickens, and peacocks, and making jams from the fruit trees that grew there. I had regular balcony visits with my mother who celebrated her 90th birthday in lockdown. A photograph album that I offered her on that special occasion reminds me of how the symbols and the rituals we were able to revisit were essential to keep a connection to loved ones. I, Carla, gave birth to my first son 1 day before the first lockdown was imposed in Portugal. The experience of transition to parenthood was profoundly shaped by the pandemic; the well-known village I had hoped for to help me raise our child was locked at home. Although emotional support was available, much needed instrumental support faced unexpected hurdles. One of my poignant memories of this time was trying to operate a baby's sling by watching an online tutorial and making an awkward video-call to a friend. What I craved was someone to physically be present and take me, my baby, and the sling to make sure it was fit for purpose. Like Ana Paula, I pondered the power of symbols—unable to throw proper birthday parties for my son during his first 2 years, we relied on over-the-top remarkably decorated cakes which became symbols of resistance and of hope in rituals to come. The pandemic was, undoubtedly, the catalyst for this special issue. The idea arose in early 2022 as a result of our common systemic background and also of the observations we gathered from clinical practice and from our experiences teaching at University. After the initial excitement of coming back to campus, following an ambivalent experience in a class on Zoom, we noticed, in teachers and mainly in students, a dropout in motivation, organization, and ability to get our acts together, as if a great foggy tiredness had settled in. This observation was in line with the emerging literature: a systematic review of longitudinal studies found an increase in indicators of poor mental health (e.g., anxiety, alcohol use, and sedentary behavior) among college students during the pandemic (Buizza et al., 2022). There was also, we sensed, a certain hurry in pushing back pandemic topics in research, as if it was not a hot trend anymore and society and academia needed to move on. There were new adversities requiring global attention, such as the war in Ukraine and resurfacing old ones that intensified in the aftermath of the pandemic, such as forced migrations, economic recession fears, and divisive politics around the world. As we write this piece, the walls of the universities we work in are painted with anti-war slogans and classes are digressed from their original course by students raising climate change issues. Nonetheless, together with Edgar Morin (Ginori, 2020), we consider the pandemic was a game-changer in terms adversity and an example of an historical unexpected event whose influence may be felt for a long time. As we tell the students whose clinical internships we supervise, in years to come, in their future practice, a useful question to ask their clients will be "How was the pandemic for you/your family?" As such, we considered that this was a momentous time to invite scholars to theorize and reflect upon families navigating the post-pandemic world, featuring a cumulative pile of global stressors against a background of pervasive global uncertainty. We were fortunate that our idea was welcomed by Mark Fine and Katherine Allen, the outgoing and incoming editors of the Journal of Family Theory Walsh, 2020). Interestingly, as the pandemic evolved, the loss of guidance might also have been felt as a loss by some. A Welsh study (Bangor University, 2023) found that individuals reporting higher levels of compliance with COVID rules during the pandemic assessed in 2020 had lower levels of current well-being 3 years later. The researchers hypothesized that intense public health messages during the initial stages of the pandemic were followed by no messaging campaign to help people transition back to normality, which may have been detrimental to a specific group of people who retained anxiety and prevention behaviors. Ambiguous loss theory is a valuable framework for understanding these experiences. In her opening commentary for the special issue, Pauline Boss (2023) discusses how global family suffering is causing fear, anger, and anxiety not due to deficits or pathology in individual or family systems but to what she calls an unrelenting context of ambiguity. Ambiguous loss, which has been useful in studying specific phenomena, is now relevant for an overarching understanding of the current global experience of loss amid uncertainty. In this special issue, three papers selected the COVID-pandemic as the main adversity (Ceberio, 2023; Medina Centeno, 2023; Pietromonaco however, one examined ways in which families could guard relational security when faced with adversities threatening attachment relationships (Berástegui Medina Centeno, 2023) and couples (Pietromonaco Walsh, 2021). Five out of seven main papers used this theoretical concept, and all seven explored ways in which families can cope with adversity, our next topic. In line with recent theoretical developments, resilience was mostly conceptualized as a dynamic process in the sense that it can be learned, however not in the sense of riding a bicycle type of skill. Instead, resilience must be revisited and transformed throughout life as what and who is resilient in one context may not be so in other setting or developmental context (Walsh, 2021). Resilience, like adversity, is bound to meaning construed by individuals, families, and communities (Ceberio, 2023; Walsh, 2021). Ceberio (2023) noted this fluidity when discussing the role of resilience guardians in the family, who are defined as individuals who take up resilience mentoring in the family when required. These roles can be either fixed or temporary depending on the situations and matters the family is facing, where a specific member could be more suitable than the others at a specific time. The dynamic nature of resilience was also acknowledged via the tension between a family's experience of stability and change. Although the most visible side of resilience seems to be the focus on the system's capacity to adapt to changes and change accordingly, it is equally important that systems harness their already existing strengths and resources. When faced with unexpected or unwanted crises, individuals and systems must quickly reorganize, integrate new information, and experiment with innovative solutions not in their previous repertoire (Ungar, 2021). Resilient trajectories of families amid global diversity have been built on two types of processes that co-evolve together in a spiral movement of continuous change (Bateson, 1979). Families relied on both morphogenesis, their capacity to change as a system, and morphostasis, their ability to preserve stability. These two processes were evident, for instance, in the Homes for Ukraine programme showing the need of both hosts and guests having to negotiate rules and accommodate to one another, but also keeping what was important for each of them (Vetere Walsh, 2021). Resilience was once considered an individual trait that made some thrive although others perished, a limiting view that offered little but to paralyze families and professionals working with them. Nowadays, resilience is agreed to be a multisystemic phenomenon nested in relationships (Ungar, 2021). In this issue, an interesting indicator of this relational conceptualization is the use of language that implies the systemic nature of constructs such as resilience or competence, namely family resilience (Ceberio, 2023; Ferreira et al., 2024), community resilience (Ferreira et al., 2024), attachment resilience (Berástegui by promoting knowledge and training and fostering social bonds, the members of communities could be perceived as collaborators with the specialists' efforts. When we launched the call for this special issue, there was a purposeful appeal for the inclusion of diverse international perspectives on family resilience and challenges. Although the field of family science, including theory, research, and practice, has greatly evolved to become an international forum, there is still a lot to be learned about family science in international context. The need to carry out studies in diverse contexts and to be able to map which principles and findings go beyond culture and which ones are culturally idiosyncratic will be certainly in the forefront of family research in the following years (Lebow, 2023). For instance, as Pietromonaco and Overall (2023) pointed out in this issue, much of the research on the effects of pandemic for couples was conducted in the US and other Western countries, with more studies needing to address how couples in sociocultural contexts are dealing with the ramifications of this adversity. Moreover, the influence of context transcends the phenomena itself, as it is relevant not only to understand families, but also to understand how scholars, in different cultural settings, theorize and conceptualize research on family topics. The building up of this special issue, which gathered two guest editors from Portugal, an editor from the US, 16 authors from eight countries and many reviewers with different backgrounds, was a unique opportunity to reflect on the richness and diversity of influences that came together and also on the trials that emerged. Interestingly, amid the diversity, theories were a mutual compass that allowed for a shared understanding by authors and reviewers involved in this special issue (Relvas, 2023). In line with tends to happen with contemporary theories (Allen Ceberio, 2023; Medina Centeno, 2023; Vetere and Shimwell, 2023) and also expanded them by introducing changes that permitted to explain new realities in a more complex way (e.g., Berástegui Hendershot Pietromonaco Lordello, 2024; Puhlman, 2024). Literature is consensual about attachment being a useful theory for understanding families who have experienced trauma and adversity but how does that translate in the daily practice of professionals? This article sparked a very interesting debate about the limits and the potential of the application of attachment theory and attachment-based techniques by professionals who are not clinically trained. We invited two scholars who are also therapists, Silvia Lordello from Brazil and Daniel Puhlman from the US to discuss this topic, knowing that their cultural, social, academic, and clinical contexts would allow them to view this issue from different perspectives. On one hand, there was concern for the ability of the family keyworkers to use sensitive tools with families in vulnerable positions: how would this work and what ought to be out of bounds for those who counsel and work with families but are not clinically trained? On the other hand, there was the argument of democratizing knowledge and allowing for families in disadvantaged communities to benefit directly and indirectly, via professional supervision, of a well-established framework. Berástegui and Pitillas (2024) provided a response to both commentaries, where they not only clarified some specific points in their paper but also revisited it in the light of new perspectives offered by the two scholars. We consider that this format, an article followed by a discussion of two or more international schools from different backgrounds and a response from the original authors, can be a good avenue to bring more diversity and visibility to academic discussions. The personal and scientific contexts are undoubtedly sources that inspire a worldview and allow scholars to become aware of relevant phenomena to look at with scientific lenses—in that sense they are great lookout points. At the same time, contexts can also be limiting, and note that Medina Centeno (2023) urged scholars to leave their specializing caves. It is essential to be genuinely curious and audacious to go beyond and be willing to learn what we do not yet know (Bateson, 2004). In conclusion, we started this editorial by celebrating "good enough families", acknowledging both the impact families suffered during the last 3 years of global adversity and their agency and ability to transform themselves and the systems around them during uncertain times. Uncertainty, as Edgar Morin recalls, is not new and has always accompanied the great human adventure (Ginori, 2020). Yet, this critical historical time is a noteworthy chance to renew thinking on its echoes for individuals, families, and local and global communities. A reflection on the seven papers and four commentaries that make up this special issue allowed us to identify the plural meanings of global adversity, and the relevance of contextualizing both adversity and the ways in which families deal with it, namely through building resilience. Lastly, in our role as international guest editors ourselves, we contemplated the means by which family science can grow more diverse and complex. We hope this issue propels scholars to continue to reflect on how context matters for both today's families and for scholars who theorize about, research, and work with them. The Guest Editors would like to thank all the authors and reviewers who contributed to this special issue, as well as to the Editor Katherine Allen for her invaluable support.