Resilience to COVID-19 challenges: Lessons for school psychologists serving school-attending black South African youth aged 10 to 19 years old

Abstract

Several studies have highlighted the mental health challenges of children and youth during the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown period, especially, in relation to an escalation of depression, anxiety, and stress. Whilst this may be the reality, it is unfortunate that most of the studies adopt a psychopathological point of departure often portraying doom and gloom. Adopting a social ecological resilience perspective the author focuses on the resilience of school-attending black South African youth during the COVID-19 lockdown period. The Child and Youth Resilience Measurement (CYRM-28) was completed by 4165 respondents in grades 4 to 12 (females = 2431, 58.4%; males = 1734, 41.6%) from the Gauteng, Mpumalanga and North-West provinces in South Africa. The findings indicate that school psychologists must consider gender, age and school levels when they design school-based resilience programmes for black South African children. Particular emphasis should be placed on contextual resilience highlighting spiritual, religious, cultural and educational factors. A major lesson for school psychologists is to ensure that school-based resiliency programmes adopt a whole school approach that includes children, their families and local communities for the successful promotion of resilience during adverse situations as postulated by the social ecological resilience model.

Keywords: Black children; COVID-19 challenges; resilience; school psychologists; schoolattending youth; social-ecological.

Figure 1.

Second-order structure of resilience using CYRM −28 using AMOS 27.0. (Source-Liebenberg et al., 2012: 222).

Figure 2.

Histogram showing data distribution in the total resilience factor.