Psychological Resilience - Children and Resilience

Children and Resilience

Resilience in children refers to individuals who are doing better than expected, given a history that includes risk or adverse experience. Simply put, resilience requires two conditions to be met: (1) the child must have experienced some sort of risk or adversity that has been linked with poor outcomes, and (2) the child is generally doing okay despite being exposed to that risk or adversity; they are not showing that poor outcome.

The dominant view is that resilience is a description of a group of children. It is not a trait or something that some children 'just have.' There is no such thing as an 'invulnerable child' who can overcome any obstacle or adversity that she encounters in life. Resilience is not a rare and magical quality. In fact, it is quite common. Resilience is the product of a large number of developmental processes over time that has allowed children who experience some sort of risk to continue to develop competently (while other children have not). Research on 'protective factors' has helped developmental scientists to understand what matters most for resilient children. Protective factors are characteristics of children or situations that particularly help children in the context of risk. There are many different protective factors that are important for resilient children. Two that have emerged time and again in studies of resilient children are good cognitive functioning (like cognitive self-regulation and IQ) and positive relationships (especially with competent adults, like parents). Children who have protective factors in their lives tend to do better in some risky contexts when compared to children without protective factors in the same contexts. However, this is not a justification to expose any child to risk. Children do better when not exposed to high levels of risk or adversity.

A separate view is that certain children survive extremely high risk environments, such as a schizophrenic parent, through personal invulnerability—a stubborn resistance to being drawn into a maelstrom of mental illness due to a profound attachment to reality. Contemporary resilience researchers and thinkers appreciate this view as something in the history of thought on resilience in development, but recognize that it is oversimplified at best. The science of resilience in development has largely moved past the idea of 'invulnerable children.'

When it comes to children, there are still many scientific debates with respect to resilience. One debate involves differing opinions about what constitutes 'doing okay.' There is considerable agreement that child competence can be defined and measured in a way that can indicate whether or not the child is doing well. Called 'age-salient developmental tasks,' these are things that are generally expected of children of a certain age, in a certain culture, of a certain time or point in history. Developmental tasks can span all areas or domains of a person's life. For example, in many cultures (but certainly not all) 14 month old children are expected to be able to show the beginnings of spoken language, early motor coordination that allows them to start walking, able to form an attachment relationship with a primary caregiver, etc. These tasks certainly change with age; generally children are expected to show increasingly sophisticated cognitive and social abilities as they grow older: 5 year olds are expected to show a higher degree of independence and self-regulation skills (for example), compared to a 2-year-old. Resilient children can be thought of as those who show competence in age-salient developmental tasks even though they have experienced some risk or adversity that threatened that competence. Others have focused on different criteria for 'doing okay', such as the absence of mental health problems like depression or conduct problems. Still others have focused on happiness or the experience of positive emotions.