Family leisure as a factor of resilience: how can we improve it within a context of residential care? Youths' perspectives

摘要

The scientific literature recognizes family leisure as an individual and familial resilience factor. This fact is justified because family leisure provides a lot of benefits; it increases communication between the members of the family, creates memories which contribute to fortify the group identity, promotes well-being and positive relationships, etc. Due to these reasons, it is considered a protective factor.In Spain, there are different alternatives for the welfare of children at risk: fostering in residential care, kinship foster care, non-kinship foster care and adoption. The present study is focused on residential care.This research shows the opinions and suggestions of young people about family leisure in a context of residential care. The design of the investigation was qualitative and the data were collected by means of 21 interviews and 5 focus groups, with a total of 43 youths at risk (most of them had been living in foster care).The youths who were interviewed appointed many ways of improving family leisure in residential care, such as the following suggestions: to use different rooms and places in the centre to try promoting family memories, to think and talk about future activities, to do activities that provide the opportunity to get to know each other better, etc.In conclusion, family leisure is a resilience factor which can be improved in residential care, and this research provides some strategies to achieve this.