If you turned out resilient, the research suggests it was probably less a superpower than ‘ordinary magic’: across a 40-year study of high-risk children, the factor that showed up most often was having at least one steady, caring adult

When Werner looked at what separated the resilient children from the rest, two clusters stood out. Resilient children almost always had at least one steady, caring adult who was reliably in their corner, and it was frequently not a parent. Resilience as ordinary magicA generation of research after Werner, the developmental psychologist Ann Masten gave the pattern a name. In an influential 2001 paper, she called resilience ordinary magic. The childhood experience that most reliably predicts a resilient adult is not a hardship that forged you, and not an inner steel you happened to possess.