Early Childhood Education Commons^™

Amir’S Life Story: Resilience And Other Soft Skills Development To Thrive, Despite Vulnerable Beginnings, Yatela Zainal-Abidin, Rosna Awang-Hashim, Hasniza Nordin

The Qualitative Report

This article explores the life story of Amir, a young adult from a rural village in Malaysia, who built resilience and developed soft skills to thrive in his life despite his vulnerable beginnings. Amir’s strong resilience and other soft skills that assisted him to be outstanding in his academics and career may have resulted from his caring and supportive authoritative mother, countering his strict and harsh authoritarian father, with an ecological system of protective factors and developmental assets strengthened by religiosity and spirituality. However, both his parents’ extremely different confrontive and coercive methods appeared to have worked together towards the …