Toward a definition of family resilience: integrating life-span and family perspectives.

Family resilience is a relatively new construct that describes how families adapt to stress and bounce back from adversity. Literature pertaining to resilience as a family-level variable is reviewed. An overview of the developmental psychopathology literature dealing with individual resilience is also provided. Implications for extending the study of family resilience drawn from research on individual resilience are discussed and a definition of family resilience is proposed.