Author Name: – Maheshwari Chand, Tosendra Dwivedi Date:- 21 March 2026
Background: Resilience, often termed “ordinary magic”, refers to the ability to adapt, recover and evolve through adversity. Within the parenting context, resilience is the enduring capacity of parents to nurture, cope and sustain well-being amid the challenges and demands of family life. Despite growing research on parental resilience, limited attention has been given to the dynamic interplay of self (intrinsic psychological resources of inner strength and self-efficacy) and spirit (existential resources of spiritual grounding, meaning making and connectedness).
Objectives: This systematic theoretical and evidence-based review (a) examines how self and spirit interplay in resilience among parents and (b) identifies overarching patterns emerging across existing studies.
Method: Searches across ProQuest One Academic, Scopus and Shodhganga identified 14 relevant peer-reviewed articles, doctoral dissertations, conceptual and theoretical papers published in English between 2010 and 2025. Inclusion criteria focused on key terms related to parental resilience, self, and spirit, excluding non-parental populations after screening 45 articles. Thematic synthesis was applied to extract recurring constructs and mechanisms that infuse resilience in parents.
Results: The key findings of the studies suggest –
-Parental resilience is co-shaped by self-efficacy and spiritual meaning as a protective pair.
-Resilience coherence emerges through the dynamic interplay of inner strength and spiritual grounding under adversity, termed self-spirit coherence.
-Conceptual and measurement gaps indicate the need for coherence-based frameworks to capture self-spirit synergy in parental resilience.
Implications for Schools: Findings advocate integrating strengths-based, value-oriented, brief reflective prompts and peer-support exercises into psycho-spiritual education through school-parent workshops and counselling programs to strengthen parental self-efficacy and resilience.
Conclusion: The paper concludes by proposing self-spirit coherence framework, considering that uneven conceptual measures highlight the future need for mixed-method and longitudinal studies to validate this synergy, which is central to cultivating parental resilience and
relational resources.
Keywords: parental resilience, self, self-efficacy, spirit, spirituality.
