The Parent Perspectives Toolkit: Discovering meaning and developing resilience

These were true survivors. When people asked us if we had a comparison group, we could find only one person in our region of the United States who represented a reasonable comparison, because he left Cambodia just before the killings began. That individual was a foot taller than any other person in our sample, likely due to the advantages in nutrition and protein intake he experienced.

These young Cambodians certainly varied in how well they were functioning in different domains of their life at school or work and at home. Southwick noted, multiple domains of life need to be considered in thinking about resilience, and individuals usually vary across domains in how well they are functioning. These experiences have influenced how I think about resilience. I have also been influenced by interacting with professionals in other fields who are concerned with resilience.

Over the past four or five decades, the notion of resilience has been taken up by many different disciplines. If you are interested in understanding the impact of major traumatic events like natural disasters, industrial disasters, global climate change, terrorist attacks, and war on child development, you have to think in terms of multiple interacting systems. Sitting down at the table with people who study engineering resilience, resilience in ecologies, resilience in communities and so forth has profoundly swayed my thinking.

I am looking for a broad conceptual definition of resilience that is scalable across different disciplines and levels of analysis. Currently, my favorite definition is that resilience refers to the capacity of a dynamic system to adapt successfully to disturbances that threaten the viability, the function, or the development of that system Masten a , b. I think this kind of definition facilitates the ability to think through and work together with people who are trying to prepare populations for dealing with disasters. We want to build that kind of capacity to adapt.

I think it is also the kind of definition you can use across system levels, from a molecular level to the levels of human behavior in family, community or even societal contexts. You can also talk about resilience in economies and so forth. There are many issues we have to deal with when we take a broad definition like this one. I want to be able to measure it. As a developmental scientist, I'm also interested in how well children are doing in all of the age-salient developmental tasks that we expect children to achieve as they move along in life. But, of course, those kinds of developmental tasks are going to vary historically, culturally, and even geographically.

I'll hold off on the rest of my comments and turn it over to the anthropologist. I am interested in the important issue of how resilience is understood across different cultures. How do we construct culturally relevant definitions of resilience? I study risk, resilience, and health in settings of violence and poverty Panter-Brick, For instance, I have studied resilience to famine in Niger, among homeless street-children in Nepal, and in the wake of war in Afghanistan e. I work with humanitarian organizations to articulate what it means to promote resilience and develop resilience-building interventions in challenging settings.

A second deadly sin is to be empirically light with respect to actively seeking evidence on resilience in a broad range of contexts—for children and adults, veterans and civilians, western and non-western societies. And the third sin is to be methodologically lame with respect to how we measure resilience, especially in places where cultural goals and cultural resources are less familiar to us. It sounds like all of you over time have changed your definitions of resilience based on research and your own experiences. What about the determinants of resilience? What makes some people more resilient than others?

What have we learned from resilience science?

From your area of expertise and from your perspective, what are the most important determinants or drivers of resilience? I don't really know what makes some people more resilient than others. If we think about resilience as a stable trajectory or predictive trait, then we can think about biological underpinnings or even one's genes as important determinants Simeon et al. However, when we think about resilience as a process, then we are talking about an organism that is actively interacting with an environment. This does not rule out biological or even genetic contributors, but it might modify our understanding of how environmental events contribute to biological changes, rather than the other way around.

I would imagine that what makes some people more resilient than others would be better support systems, better opportunities, better DNA, and a host of other non-DNA factors either appearing alone or interacting with one another. There are many different factors that could make some people more resilient than others.

But the prominence of a biological underpinning of resilience is going to depend on our definition of whether resilience is a trait that determines a response to adversity or results from environmental engagement. A very simple way to begin to address this issue is to do longitudinal studies. In our laboratory, we have been studying how biological variables that are measured after trauma exposure change in people who are treated for PTSD.

As we all know, some people respond better than others, and many do not respond to specialized PTSD psychotherapy. By asking about biological changes before and after treatment in responders and non-responders to treatment, it is possible to know whether responders are different biologically even before treatment is administered. That would suggest that predictors of recovery are predetermined even before treatment begins. However, if responders and non-responders only differ from each other biologically at post-treatment, this would indicate that what actually happens in treatment is the critical determinant, and that biological correlates of recovery can occur in anyone who responds to a therapeutic modality.

We like to think that response to therapy depends on the type of therapeutic approach or the skill of the therapist. However, this simple paradigm can actually tell us whether variations in biology predict who will or who will not respond successfully to therapy Yehuda et al. We could also expect some biological changes to associate with recovery since biology changes and adapts to the environment and is highly influenced by numerous other factors, such as available resources and your own internal drive to fight. The decision to fight back against adversity is a complicated one that many people have the remarkable capacity to make.

We are a social species. I have argued in the past Masten, that there are fundamental adaptive systems that have come down to us through biological and cultural evolution and these are constantly being created and constantly changing. We are all living human systems that interact continuously with our environments. It's all about process.

When you think of young children, for example, they are products of evolution and they are very adaptive. They have a lot of inherent adaptive capacity. But part of that capacity is embedded in the caregiver bond. I think it is very interesting to consider the adaptive systems that are common to humans as well as other closely related social species. Some systems, like the way our attachment systems work at a biological level and a behavioral level, are very similar to the way they work in other species. But we also are a species that has been influenced by cultural evolution and we have freed ourselves from biology through our capacity for language, learning and memory.

So we are able to pass down a tremendous amount of knowledge about what helps, what works and what doesn't work. Some of our capacity comes from our inherent potential and some from what we learn over time. A human brain in good working order has tremendous capacity to learn and pick up information about how to cope. Our self-regulation skills are vitally important for adapting to many kinds of threats to human experience.

Much of resilience, especially in children, but also throughout the life span, is embedded in close relationships with other people. Those relationships give you a profound sense of emotional security and the feeling that someone has your back, because they do. As we get older we have the capability for spiritual relationships as well as friendships with other human living contemporaries and again we draw great capacity for adaptation from those relationships. Another extremely important adaptive system that needs more research at many levels of analyses is the mastery motivation system.

This system was identified decades ago and we see this in very young children. You can easily see this when you watch young children throwing things off the highchair or walking for the first time with great delight. The mastery motivation system is a very powerful driver of learning and resilience Masten, b.

As a clinician I think it's challenging to help people if that system is shut down for any reason. Mastery motivation is a powerful driver of resilience and this adaptive system is another one that you see across multiple species. Again I'm going to yield to our anthropologist to talk about the capacity that is embedded in cultures. Although there is more research in recent years on cultural aspects of resilience, cultural processes generally have been understudied. Now there is growing focus on the ways in which people all over the world draw on cultural practices, beliefs and learning and support from each other to endure and recover from all kind of challenges.

As I hear about the biological perspectives on resilience and the developmental mastery perspective on resilience, I want to add a few words on a cultural perspective on resilience. Let me give you an example. I conducted systematic face-to-face interviews with over a thousand families, both youth and adults, in Afghanistan. For me, what makes some families more resilient than others is their ability to hang on to a sense of hope that gives meaning and order to suffering in life and helps to articulate a coherent narrative to link the future to the past and present.

A body of lots of work has also documented the social ecology of resilience, which includes studying how key resources in the social, economic, cultural, or political environment influence individual-level or family-level resilience. For me, that's really the essence of a cultural and social perspective on resilience. We need to provide people with the resources that facilitate their ability to create a better future and construct meaning in life.

This is in line with the philosophy of Viktor Frankl, who believed that it was best to focus on what is left rather than what is lost whenever possible. Of course, this is easier said than done. Panter-Brick, your comments are also related to optimism or the belief that things will work out. We seem to have moved from the minute to the broad. I'm going to take us back to the minute, to the data.

It's interesting that you brought up Viktor Frankl because he wrote decades ago. His ideas are moving and important but in my opinion those ideas take us only so far. I've argued recently that the word resilience is almost useless as a single word and that it really only makes sense if we qualify it. For example, the type of process that Dr. Yehuda brought up is very different than the kind of process that I've been studying and that Dr. Panter-Brick were talking about. In most of our work, we have focused on minimal-impact resilience in response to acute adversities.

We have thus far determined that there are five basic categories of factors that predict this kind of minimal-impact trajectory Bonanno et al. First there are economic resources, as Dr. Stevan Hobfall has been talking about for years see Hobfoll et al. Resources are incredibly important, although we don't talk about them much when we talk about resilience because they're basic, not quite as sexy, and building resources costs a lot of money. Then there are social resources. There is personality, which is something we all love to think about, and genetic factors.

But personality and genes are just two of the many pieces of the puzzle and they are actually small pieces. If we measure many different predictors, we find that no one predictor accounts for much variance. What I mean is that no single demographic, personality or biological factor has been shown to predict or enhance resilience by more than a small degree. My approach is to study a specific kind of resilience, minimal-impact resilience, as well as a specific set of factors that each may on their own contribute a relatively small piece of the puzzle. From there we can work our way to a broader picture.

So I'm really advocating bringing it back down to a more focused empirical perspective. Please permit me to comment on that, because I don't think that the goal is to come up with one definition for resilience. I think that it is fantastic that different people are looking at the phenomenon of resilience from different contexts. It is important for anyone that does a specific piece of research to let everyone know what their question is and what was studied and what the specific outcome variables were.

We should absolutely not restrict the field by tethering it to one person's conception of resilience. But I wanted to make another point as I am listening to all of these wonderful comments. I think it is important to reflect on the fact that here we are at an international meeting about traumatic stress and we are having a plenary on the topic of resilience, not trauma. This is an extraordinary development and represents the desire of the field to not be hijacked by pathological symptoms or negative effects of trauma.

So it doesn't really matter if we have different definitions of resilience. It matters that we continue to have a conversation about resilience because the meta-message is that the experience of trauma does not only yield pathology. I do think it's important, as I think Dr. Bonanno was highlighting, to distinguish between concepts and models and how we approach our empirical work and it's critical that we define our criteria very, very carefully in our empirical work.

Each of us does research in different areas, although some of our research probably overlaps. It is extremely important to very carefully define the criteria of adaptive function and adversity for your studies, the levels of analysis and processes that you are attempting to measure.

In regard to this question, what have we learned about what makes a difference? There is a huge literature now on the topic of resilience in children and youth e. There clearly are some particular protective and resilience-enhancing factors that are implicated over and over again as important across a wide variety of circumstances, such as children having a protective parent on the scene who is functioning pretty well and protecting the child. But there is also a great deal of diversity in this literature as well. If you take a specific context and look at particular criteria for defining adaptive function you will invariably get a somewhat different understanding of protective factors that matter, and this is very striking when you look at the global research on resilience in children and adolescents.

You may think you have some important process thought through carefully and then something provocative will come up. For example, I am very fond of the notion that agency, along with the pleasure and perceived mastery that goes along with that adaptive system, is a powerful protective factor in human development Masten, b.

However, research on youth who become involved in political violence in Middle-Eastern conflict-prone areas indicates that they become engaged at least partly because it gives them a sense of mastery and involvement Barber, We have to be very precise about what contexts we are studying.

That was a tough question. It could refer to peace in a school, peace in a community or global peace but it was a very provocative question. When you are confronted by the empirical evidence from very different circumstances, it sharpens your thinking. It is important to know—whether it is for young people in Afghanistan or other young people around the world—what facilitates resilience?

I think that we are moving toward a more personalized version of resilience that is embedded in context. We can learn about general principles of resilience but the reality is that people differ and for some individuals, different protective factors may be important for specific outcomes in specific contexts. This is a great challenge: How do you measure resilience from a multidisciplinary stand point? Where do you begin? Where have you begun Dr. I think that there are global challenges where people had to sit down and think about this issue, for example to think about how to prepare a population for disaster.

In Minnesota we don't prepare for hurricanes, but we prepare for other kinds of disasters that could occur there. In thinking about disaster planning, you think about the systems involved in human life and adaptation in a given context. The lives of children are embedded in families and schools, as well as communities and cultures. What you do is get teams of people together that represent different areas of relevant expertise, different sciences and intervention realms, having to do with schools and families and community and state and emergency response systems.

How do we prepare first responders so they can operate with an awareness of all the different systems that are involved in emergency response, including schools, families, and children? One of the reasons it is taking so long to recover from Hurricane Katrina, and now from Superstorm Sandy, is because so many systems that are interdependent collapsed all at the same time or were damaged.

Resilience definitions, theory, and challenges: interdisciplinary perspectives

It takes a while to build them up. People are learning to get together and put together plans and solutions focused on integrated responses to a particular kind of problem, such as a flu pandemic, a hurricane, or a terrorist attack, etc. They are trying to think through the key systems involved and what we know about fostering and supporting resilience in those systems because if you ever go through a major disaster you are deeply imprinted with the realization that your own resilience is highly interdependent on many other layers of systems and how they're operating.

1. The Elliot Silvestri Erotic Reader.
2. The Colored Lens: Winter 2013;
3. .
4. .
5. .
6. .

But as the recovery goes forward, major systems, including communications, are being restored and rebuilt. Planning for disasters and recovery needs to consider the adaptation of interconnected systems, the needs of children and families, and how to support recovery at different stages of rebuilding. When we think of resilience, we often focus on the individual but in fact we need to consider embedded systems. How about technology and resilience? How are new technologies and research in fields such as genetics, epigenetics and brain imaging informing the science of resilience?

It is not yet clear exactly if or how the science or biology of resilience is going to impact the way we deal with trauma in the context of systems. I think there is a real opportunity for science to inform us about the more narrow question of recovery from certain kinds of consequences that are maladaptive. If we understand the kind of biological underpinning of symptoms, then we may be able to have effective interventions for those who we know are going into harm's way, or we may be able to identify those people more rapidly and then build resilience programs on an individual level.

But scientific advances hold great promise for helping us in very important ways. For example, if there was a specific imperative e. Or if you think about the biological measures predicting recovery or treatment, there might be an ability to use technologies and research and genetics or epigenetics or molecular biology to match people to the interventions that are going to be most likely to help them achieve success.

Those would be very important contributions to individuals and society. I have a different twist on the question. The role of technology in how people deal with adversities became very apparent during Super Storm Sandy in New York where I live. There was a great example of the use of texting.

The local power company was trying to tell people what was happening but the power station blew out and Lower Manhattan was in darkness. People in the outer lying areas had lost power and that's a big issue when you're trying to cope with disaster. So people were texting each other right away with important information and updates. This got me very interested in the crucial importance of social capital.

Then, not long after, I was asked to speak with the principals of the schools that were knocked out by Super Storm Sandy. I presented my research and they told stories of their experiences. Their stories were all about social capital: So this kind of phenomenon seems very important. There's a lot of theory about social capital but it's very poorly studied in relation to psychological functioning. We did manage to collect data on this in New Jersey, after the storm, and we are in the process of linking this data with prospective data that had been collected previously by Rachel Pruchno.

I think these kinds of technological applications may be crucial and can be fostered. I was hoping to hear from Dr. Bonanno about whether any biological changes have been observed in association with the trajectories of resilience that he has studied. Of course, technology is always going to improve our lives, but those of us in the neuroscience space wonder how this work helps shape our conclusions about these psychological constructs because, to date, our policies are almost exclusively driven by sociology or psychology.

If neuroscience confirms the trajectories, that would be important information, as would be a disconfirmation by biological data. I'm not a neuroscientist but I'm absolutely fascinated by the stress response equipment that we have; it's not only genetic, or the amygdala, or the hippocampus. It's the whole integrated system and it works amazingly well.

A little bit later the hypothalamic pituitary adrenal axis and the cortisol system is activated and the way this works absolutely fascinates me. We have an immediate response so we can react right away—a little bit like crying for help—and then we have a longer term response related to cortisol and peptides and other neuroendocrine mechanisms that only come on line when we're dealing with an enduring stressor. When I first learned about this process, I wondered why we would send a neuroendocrine response via the blood, from the brain way down to the adrenal glands.

Why did nature evolve such a circuitous path? Part of the answer is precisely because it's slower. When the slower response finally does come online, we're really dealing with a more powerful response, almost an alternate state of consciousness. Coming late to this as a kind of novice, I find this amazing. But then it raises this great question of why does this not work for everyone? Yehuda has done some really important work in this area, along with Drs. This to me is really where the money is in terms of figuring out, at least internally, the stress system.

But what I think needs to happen is this work needs to be done in concert with research on different outcome patterns, trajectory analyses. This is, of course, very easy to say and very hard to do. In my lab we have been mapping outcome trajectories using sophisticated latent modeling procedures. We are also attempting to integrate this approach with the use of experimental procedures.

It's complicated because latent modeling requires large samples, but experimental, and of course biological, procedures have to test people one at a time. The real work that needs to be done hasn't quite been done yet, but I think it's enormously important. I think doing this kind of work in a context of trajectory analyses would really do a lot to distinguish why some people are resilient and some are not.

I want to briefly talk about what we call the biomarkers of resilience. These include measures of blood pressure, stress hormones, immune function, and gene methylation. We can use these biomarkers to help us connect the dots between the neurobiology and physiology of resilience and the culture of resilience. One powerful use of biomarkers would be to measure physiological stress before and after such an intervention.

I am advocating this approach, because I do think that using biomarkers for program evaluation is a growth area for research in the future. This is not just because we want to willy-nilly use biomarkers to measure the signatures of adversity on the human body, but because we think that, once we understand resilience, we should be savvy in measuring indicators of change in resilience-building interventions over time. Biomarkers offer us an evaluation tool other than self-reported data on feelings and behaviors.

They help us understand the mechanisms through which risk and resilience leave epigenetic and physiological signatures on the body, which have developmental implications for young children and long-term health implications for adults. Since I began graduate school, the transformation in tools and technology available to study resilience is staggering. Back then, we assumed there was a neurobiology of resilience but measures were unavailable or were impractical.

Protective Factors and the Development of Resilience in the Context of Neighborhood Disadvantage

At that time it was very expensive or very difficult to study the neurobiology of resilience. Now investigators are doing all kinds of fascinating work—watching the brain in action during adaptation or measuring epigenetic change, not only as an indicator of adaptive function, but also as a moderator of response to interventions. We also now have the capabilities through widespread use of the Internet to collaborate with people around the world and upload and feedback data from the field.

The measures we are capable of getting out there in the field and practically in the middle of nowhere are having a huge impact on the science of studying adaptation. Another important area of advancing methodology in resilience is statistics. We had all this lovely theory about trajectories and patterns of resilience but now we are able to get repeated measures and use growth analyses either to study the patterns of change over time or to extract and test our ideas about pathways.

Are there real life trajectories like we hypothesized a few decades ago? Now we have capabilities and tools at our finger tips or through collaborations that are transforming the way we think about resilience and how it works. Can the capacity for resilience be enhanced or taught? Please address the question from your area of research.

I want to point out that we have to be very careful here because resilience is common. If we think about something prophylactically, we have to make sure that we are not undermining people's natural resilience. For example, if we look at the literature on human factors, we see that interventions like bicycle helmets, or seat belts, which make people safer actually tend to increase accidents. That's because people feel safer so they become less cautious. There are a lot of different factors that might make people resilient, and if we're talking about enhancing these factors we have to target which factors are most feasible for a review, see Bonanno et al.

Masten have brought up. We have argued that there are three key components to flexibility: The underlying idea is that there isn't a right or perfect way to cope. It all depends on the situation—that idea alone is news to some people. I am often asked by the media to comment on major events, such as the Boston Marathon bombing. The questions are often about what people should do, what is the best way to cope. And I often find myself saying it depends on who they are, what happened to them and what the situation is.

Protective Factors and the Development of Resilience in the Context of Neighborhood Disadvantage

I think that the most important and effective way to approach resilience is to start with listening to what people have to say about their everyday lives. I want to understand what goals are important, and identify what people are already doing for themselves to reach them. So the first thing I would do to identify resilience is to talk with people and listen to what their goals are. I'll come back to the example of Afghanistan, where families tell us they suffer the drip, drip, drip of multiple everyday stressors, engendered by war, poverty, social inequality, family quarrels, and community conflict.

But Afghans will also tell us that what matters most to life is sustaining a sense of hope and dignity. Ashraf Ghani, former Finance Minister and current President, emphasized that human dignity should be front and center of plans for social and economic development. Here we see that effort to sustain dignity, rather than simply to alleviate misery, is the key to a hopeful future. There are a lot of things we can do in terms of social justice to bring about greater equity in society. I think that interventions targeted at readiness for jobs and education, targeted at alleviating violence and human insecurity, or targeted at social justice to enhance fairness in access to resources are among the most effective ways to enhance resilience.

I'm not being fuzzy here, I'm being really serious—remember, I don't endorse approaches that are hazy, light, or lame! Taking the perspective of any parent whose children are at risk, I am here emphasizing that interventions that take only a piecemeal or short-term action to boost physical and mental health do not necessarily resonate with my cultural goals. What may matter more to me is that my children will get a fair deal in society and have a decent life, so that human dignity is not incessantly eroded.

So listen to my cultural goals, because those are the ones that matter for my family to survive and thrive. For me this will depend a lot on what your timing is. If you are trying to enhance resilience from a developmental point of view the best thing you can do is to promote healthy development, to make sure that the brain is developing in healthy ways, that the family caregiving system is working well, and so forth, so that you end up with populations of people who have developed their capacity for adaptation.

Our species has great potential for adaptive capacity if we provide a healthy context for development. I'm extremely concerned in this country that we are allowing so many children to be harmed by toxic levels of stress exposure that affects their capacity to adapt before they barely get off the ground. I study children in homeless families in the Twin Cities and it is frightening to see how much damage can be done before you even get to kindergarten by having overwhelming levels of trauma and adversity day after day.

I would support key natural protective systems for child development, especially families, so they can provide what their children need. Ideally, we want to enhance resilience before trauma occurs by practicing how we would respond to a trauma.

We don't do that in our culture. We like to live our lives with the idea that nothing bad will happen and everything is going to be all right. And so that is the message that we give our children: And that's what we tell our selves—everything is going to be all right.

Perhaps it would be more prudent to prepare for adversity. According to statistics, we know that the probability of trauma occurring is high, so we don't have to wonder if trauma exposure will occur, but when is it going to happen? And we must prepare early on. What are the ways—on an individual level that one can use resources to cope with adversities so that for starters, exposure is not such a shock.

After trauma occurs the way to enhance resilience is to find the places where there are strengths. Maybe there is natural resilience. Maybe it is necessary to have a really good infrastructure to help those who are less naturally resilient. Maybe it is important to have a good community.

Different people are going to need different things to actualize their resilience. But we have to look for the thing that is present for that individual and go with it so that there is at least one strong foundation on which to build more resilience. I agree with what has been said, but I think that a culture that expects to have to deal with adversity will deal with it better, and we have not spoken at all about preparation, which may be an important key. In this International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies presentation, an interdisciplinary group of experts tackled some of the most pressing current questions in the field of resilience research, generating a lively discussion on need for definitions of resilience, the most important determinants of resilience, new technologies that may inform the science of resilience, and lastly, the most effective ways to enhance resilience.

Proposed definitions included a stable trajectory of healthy functioning after a highly adverse event; a conscious effort to move forward in an insightful and integrated positive manner as a result of lessons learned from an adverse experience; the capacity of a dynamic system to adapt successfully to disturbances that threaten the viability, function, and development of that system; and a process to harness resources in order to sustain well-being.

A number of these definitions bring into question the notion that resilience is characterized by the absence of functional impairment or psychopathology following highly adverse events. For example, should we classify a trauma survivor as resilient if that person develops chronic symptoms of PTSD but also functions at a high level, because they have succeeded in seeking out and using ample personal, material and social resources? All panelists stressed the importance of continued research directed toward establishing empirically driven operational definitions of resilience, recognizing that resilience is a complex construct that may have specific meaning for a particular individual, family, organization, society and culture; that individuals may be more resilient in some domains of their life than others, and during some phases of their life compared with other phases; and that there are likely numerous types of resilience e.

On the one hand, the goal may not be to agree on one definition of resilience, but rather to carefully define various types of resilience depending on context. On the other hand, in order to establish a single broader, but nevertheless useful, definition of resilience, it will be essential to collaborate with experts who study engineering, ecological, biological, individual, family, organizational and cultural resilience.

Panelists discussed the need to approach our understanding of resilience and its determinants from multiple levels of analysis, including genetic, epigenetic, developmental, demographic, cultural, economic and social. In research to date, specific determinants generally serve as relatively weak predictors of resilience by themselves and explain a relatively small piece of the puzzle. An exception may be childhood protective factors that are routinely identified as being important for developing resilience. These include a healthy attachment relationship and good caregiving, emotion regulation skills, self-awareness and the capacity to visualize the future, and a mastery motivation system that drives the individual to learn, grow and adapt to their environment.

In fact, several studies have found that some protective factors are diminished in the context of severe neighborhood disadvantage Silk et al. Thus it is important to determine whether protective factors work similarly across levels of neighborhood disadvantage, or whether the benefits are limited to specific contexts. IQ is one of the most widely researched and validated protective factors in the child domain Masten and Coatsworth Children with high IQs may be more likely to possess effective information-processing and problem-solving skills, which enable them to contend with the stresses and challenges they encounter.

Children with higher intellectual skills should also perform better at school; increased academic success is associated with the adoption of social norms and integration into prosocial peer groups Masten and Coatsworth Across risk status, child IQ has consistently been found to predict a range of positive outcomes, including academic achievement, pro-social behavior, and peer social competence Masten et al. Emotion regulation has been studied less frequently as a protective factor than IQ, but there is ample research to suggest that it is an important component of successful adaptation Masten and Coatsworth Children who are adept at managing their emotions may be better able to proactively cope with stressors, and thereby decrease the associated negative effects.

Across contexts of risk, such children should function better in school and social relationships because they are able to modulate negativity and emotional expression. Conversely, a lack of control over emotion has been consistently associated with problem behaviors in children Calkins and Fox , while the ability to manage one's emotional expression has predicted more positive social functioning in middle childhood both contemporaneously and longitudinally Eisenberg et al.

A wide variety of specific parenting practices have been shown to be associated with children's positive social adjustment, including warmth, consistent discipline, responsiveness, structure, and monitoring Masten and Reed One of the factors most consistently associated with positive outcomes is nurturant, responsive parenting. Across risk status, various aspects of nurturant or responsive parenting have been associated with lower levels of externalizing and internalizing behavior Masten et al.

In addition to specific parenting practices, the quality of the parent—child relationship has also been examined in relation to positive child outcomes. Theoretically, having a good relationship with a parent prepares the child to engage in healthy productive relationships with other people in the social environment. In support of this idea, Ingoldsby et al. Researchers have found that the quality and closeness of the parent—child relationship relates to child outcomes across risk status Emery and Forehand ; Radke-Yarrow and Brown Several studies, however, have found that qualities of the parent—child relationship are not related to positive outcomes for children living in the worst neighborhoods Gorman-Smith et al.

Much research has focused on how the quality of the marriage may affect parenting and the parent—child relationship, for example, by increasing the parent's psychosocial resources and ability to consistently deal with child behavior e. Direct associations between marital quality and various child outcomes also have been demonstrated Cummings et al. For example, a positive marital relationship may increase children's emotional security, which in turn can affect their ability to cope with daily stressors Davies and Cummings Conversely, marital relationships characterized by low conflict or the use of constructive tactics to resolve conflict have been associated with low levels of child adjustment problems Belsky et al.

Marital quality also has been positively associated with a range of positive child outcomes Belsky ; Porter et al. Indeed, low discord between parents may serve as a key protective factor Emery and Forehand The current study addresses several issues pertinent to the literature on resilience. First, in contrast to studies that have relied on cross-sectional methodologies investigating predominantly European American, middle-class samples e.

Importantly, the entire sample could be considered high risk, relative to other samples, due to low socio-economic status. Second, we also investigated whether the relative benefits of certain protective factors might differ depending on both the severity and persistence over time of neighborhood disadvantage, which provides a strong measure of environmental risk. The question of whether protective processes differ across levels of risk is an important one for designing effective intervention programs, and can also contribute to our theoretical conceptualization of resilience at severe levels of risk.

Third, the current study takes a person-centered approach to defining resilience, which enables us to examine whether protective factors differentiate between groups of children. Furthermore, resilience was defined both by low levels of antisocial behavior and high levels of social skills to ensure that children were functioning adaptively across domains.

Finally, this study responds to calls for examining multiple aspects of risk, protective factors, and positive adjustment Masten et al. Protective factors in early childhood are of particular interest, given that interventions may be more effective when initiated in early versus later childhood e. The current study had two aims: Family contextual adversity was defined by neighborhood disadvantage measured longitudinally from age 1. It was hypothesized that specific early child and family characteristics, including child IQ, emotion regulation skills, nurturant parenting, the quality of the parent—child relationship, and parental romantic partner relationship quality RPRQ would be associated with low antisocial behavior and high social skills in early adolescence.

However, in line with other research comparing protective factors at different levels of high neighborhood risk e. Participants in this study were part of the Pitt Mother and Child Project PMCP , a longitudinal study of child vulnerability and resiliency in low-income families. The sample was restricted to boys to increase the likelihood of emergent conduct problems and more serious forms of antisocial behavior during adolescence. Two-thirds of mothers in the sample had 12 years of education or less. Thus, a large proportion of the families in this study could be considered high risk due to their low socioeconomic status.

The current study utilized a subsample of boys who had data on both later antisocial behavior and social skills. Retention rates have generally been high at each of ten timepoints from age 1. When compared with those who dropped out at earlier times, participants who remained in the study at ages 11 and 12 showed no difference on the CBCL Externalizing factor at ages 2, 3. These results suggest that children of families who dropped out of the study were not more likely to exhibit conduct problems than children of families who had outcome data at ages 11 and During these visits, mothers completed questionnaires regarding socio-demographic characteristics, family issues e.

Children were interviewed regarding their own adjustment starting at age 5. Beginning at age 6 and continuing through age 12, children's teachers were asked to complete several questionnaires on the child's adjustment, including the Social Skills Rating System. The visits with the child and mother at ages 1. Participants were reimbursed for their time at the end of each visit. In cases in which data for a composited measure were missing at one of two timepoints or for one of two informants, data from the one data point were used to minimize missing data.

When data were missing for a variable, we took a conservative approach and did not impute data, using a list-wise method of deletion to ensure that only subjects with complete data were entered into the analysis. Neighborhood disadvantage was ascertained using data from early to middle childhood i. Block group is the smallest unit for which all census data are available, and thus provides the best representation of the proximal neighborhood context a child is exposed to.

Addresses were collected from to , so both and census data were used. For data from assessments collected between and , the census data were used; for data from assessments collected between and , the census data were used. In the present study, these individual variables were standardized, summed, and then averaged after reverse scoring median family income and percent Bachelor's degree to create an overall neighborhood disadvantage score for each block group.

In the current study, risk status was determined by both the severity and persistence over time of neighborhood disadvantage using groups identified based on Nagin's semiparametric, group-based approach for analyzing trajectories TRAJ. This method identifies the number of trajectories within a given population and then estimates the proportion of individuals following each trajectory. Consequently, children can be assigned to groups based on their exposure to persistent high or low versus ascending or descending neighborhood disadvantage from age 1.

This method allowed for a person-centered approach to risk classification, with an objective, dynamic representation of risk and change over time, rather than collapsing across data points and potentially obscuring important developmental patterns. Our overarching goal was to evaluate the predictive validity of protective factors in early childhood; however, we also wanted to select developmentally salient timepoints for optimal assessment, utilizing observable measures when possible. Consequently, some protective factors were measured later than others.

For example, as IQ is more reliably assessed in the preschool versus toddler period Flanagan and Alfonso , it was not assessed until children were 5. Alternatively, because emotion regulation and parenting can be reliably assessed as early as the toddler period, both were measured earlier in development. When repeated measures of a variable were available, we used composites of to create a more generalizable construct. Child IQ was first measured at age 5. The Block Design, Geometric Design, Information, and Vocabulary subtests were selected because of the magnitude of their individual factor loadings, split-half reliability coefficients BD: During the age 3.

This task was designed to measure children's coping strategies and ability to regulate affect in a delay-of-gratification context. During the 3 min, children had to wait for the cookie with little stimulation to occupy their time. All toys and activities were removed from the room, and the mother was instructed to complete questionnaires. Mothers were also told not to allow the child to have the cookie until the end of the waiting period. At the end of 3 min, the examiner signaled to the mother to give the cookie to the child.

The primary objective in using this measure was to represent child emotion regulation strategies that presumably will be associated with positive outcomes in later childhood, including sustained regulation of negative emotions and the ability to distract oneself. Thus, the following previously coded ratings of strategy and affect were used to generate an emotion regulation variable that focuses on children who show high levels of active distraction and infrequent displays of anger during the waiting task. Specifically, strategies were coded based on a system created by Grolnick et al. The presence or absence of child active distraction was scored in s intervals.

Introduction

Active distraction was defined as purposeful behaviors in which the focus of attention was shifted from the delay object or task, including fantasy play, exploration of the room, singing, talking with mother, or turning lights on and off. Displays of child anger were also coded from videotape using procedures adapted by Cole et al. There was no coder membership overlap between the active distraction and affect coding teams.

Coders were unaware of the study hypotheses. This commonly used measure combines the use of observational ratings and data gathered from an interview with the parent to generate indices of maternal behavior and quality of the home environment. Two of the six subscales were aggregated in the present study to create a single measure of Nurturant Parenting.

The Acceptance subscale is comprised of eight items assessing maternal response to child misbehavior or distress e. Two items regarding the family home i. Past research has demonstrated inter-observer agreement of 0. Parent—child relationship quality was measured at ages 5 and 6 using the Adult—Child Relationship Scale, an adaptation of the Student—Teacher Relationship Scale Pianta et al.

The original questionnaire, which focused on teacher—child relationship quality, was modified to assess maternal perception of openness and conflict in the relationship with their child. The Openness scale consists of five items e. An average of the openness and conflict scores from ages 5 to 6 was used to create an overall score for each scale; then the conflict score was subtracted from the openness score to obtain the final score for PCRQ. Internal consistency for this scale was 0. Maternal perception of the level of satisfaction in her marital or significant-other relationship was assessed at the age 1.

Prior research demonstrates that this measure differentiates between harmonious and disturbed marriages Hershorn and Rosenbaum ; Locke and Wallace and also predicts child behavior problems Emery and O'Leary In situations in which mothers were recently separated, they were asked to report on that period of the past year when they were still living with their partner. An average of the scores from the 1. Internal consistency ranged from 0. Child report was utilized to assess antisocial behavior at ages 11 and 12 because of the increasing covert nature of antisocial activities during later school-age and early adolescence, and because maternal reports become increasingly unreliable as children near adolescence Loeber and Schmaling To be in the final analyses, participants needed to have data on antisocial behavior and social skills.

For purposes of the present study, items with low base rates in our sample were also removed e. As we were interested in the frequency of delinquent behavior, rather than in specific types of delinquent behavior, individual items were averaged to generate a total delinquency scale. A composite of the average problem scores at ages 11 and 12 was used in the present analyses. As noted above, when only one score was available, the age or age report was used as the SRA score.

The SSRS is a questionnaire measuring child cooperation, assertiveness, and self-control with peers and adults e. The SSRS parent and teacher versions have 4-week test—retest reliability ranging from 0. Internal consistency on the SSRS for this sample ranged from 0. Additionally, both versions of the SSRS demonstrate adequate content and criterion-related validity Gresham and Elliot At age 11, the standardized total social skills scores from mother and teacher reports were averaged and then aggregated with teacher reports at age Once again, when data from only one timepoint or informant was available, data from that existing data point were used.

Prior to presenting results for each of the study's main hypotheses, descriptive statistics and intercorrelations are described for the independent and dependent variables. This is followed by a discussion of the process for selecting trajectories of neighborhood disadvantage. Next, direct associations between child and family protective factors and child positive social adjustment will be examined, followed by an examination of interactions between individual child and family protective factors and neighborhood disadvantage in relation to child positive social adjustment low antisocial behavior and high social skills.

Descriptive statistics for all study variables appear in Table 1 , and intercorrelations among protective factors appear in Table 2. A semi-parametric mixture model for censored data was used to estimate trajectories of neighborhood disadvantage based on block-group level census information Nagin Several decision criteria are employed to determine the best-fitting model: Statistical significance of the trajectory parameter estimates provides information on the model fit of each trajectory group, including indices for intercept, linear, quadratic, and cubic models.

BIC scores emphasize parsimony, thus they include a penalty for adding additional trajectory groups taking into account sample size. Finally, posterior probabilities offer another indicator of the precision of model fit by delineating the likelihood that an individual person would be assigned to each estimated trajectory group based on their observed data. The more accurately the trajectory group reflects the individual's observed data, the higher the posterior probability that the individual would be assigned to that particular trajectory. The individual posterior probabilities for each individual within a trajectory group can be averaged to reveal how well that particular trajectory represents the observed data of the individual group members.

Generally, a group average posterior probability over 0. For a more detailed explanation of the criteria for selecting trajectory groups, see Nagin This controls for the fact that neighborhood conditions may have changed from the to censuses, and allows the trajectories to reflect only changes in neighborhood disadvantage that occurred from families moving into another area. Without controlling for census year, the data would reflect an artificial change in neighborhood condition between and as a result of switching from the census to the census.

The BIC scores for three, four, five, and six group models were compared. Although the BIC was highest for the six group model, the five group model was ultimately selected, as the six group model split the three lower disadvantage trajectories from the five group model into four low disadvantage trajectories, one of which contained only six participants. Because the primary goal of this study was to compare low disadvantage and high disadvantage neighborhood trajectories, the distinction among these lower disadvantage trajectories was not deemed important.

For the five group model, the trajectory coefficients representing linear trends were significant for the two highest disadvantage trajectories high descending disadvantage group: Model selection was corroborated by examining posterior probabilities, which were high, ranging from 0. To examine the hypotheses that child and family factors assessed in early childhood would be directly associated with later positive child outcomes, a series of point biserial correlations were computed to assess individual associations between child i. A series of multiple logistic regressions were conducted to examine the hypothesis that neighborhood disadvantage would moderate the relationship between child and family factors and positive social adjustment.

Specifically, we expected that child and family factors would be less strongly related to positive social adjustment in the context of more adverse trajectories of neighborhood disadvantage. Independent variables were centered prior to creating the interaction terms.

Because neighborhood disadvantage is a categorical variable, each trajectory received a dummy code, with either the chronic disadvantage or the high descending disadvantage group serving as the reference group; hence, two separate regressions were computed for each protective factor. An individual protective factor was entered in the first step, followed by the dummy coded neighborhood trajectories, and finally by the interaction terms between the protective factor and the neighborhood trajectories.

When significant interactions were identified, they were examined using the procedure described by Aiken and West for exploring interactions between continuous and categorical variables, in which the significance of the simple slopes within each level of the categorical groups are tested e. Contrary to study hypotheses, none of the interactions between the child protective factors and neighborhood disadvantage were significant, although several interactions approached significance Table 3.

With high descending risk as the reference group, there was a trend toward interactions between the two child factors and moderate risk IQ: This indicates that the relationship between RPRQ and positive social adjustment significantly differed for children in the lowest versus high descending disadvantage group. Thus, for children at greater than the lowest level of neighborhood disadvantage there was no relationship between high levels of parental RPRQ and child positive social adjustment. Relation between RPRQ and positive social adjustment at two levels of neighborhood disadvantage.

Summary of logistic regression analyses predicting child positive social adjustment from child factors with neighborhood disadvantage as a moderator. Summary of logistic regression analyses predicting child positive social adjustment from rprq with neighborhood disadvantage as a moderator. Summary of logistic regression analyses predicting child positive social adjustment from parenting factors with neighborhood disadvantage as a moderator. This study also addressed whether the benefits of protective factors might vary depending on both the duration and the severity of neighborhood disadvantage.

In line with hypotheses, child IQ, parental nurturance, and parent—child relationship quality were found to be associated with positive social adjustment in early adolescence. When interactions between individual protective factors and neighborhood disadvantage trajectories were investigated to test the moderating role of neighborhood disadvantage status in the prediction of positive social adjustment, only parental romantic partner relationship quality RPRQ was found to reliably interact with neighborhood disadvantage.

High levels of RPRQ were significantly related to positive outcomes only for boys in neighborhoods characterized by relatively low risk i. The finding that high levels of child and family protective factors were associated with positive social adjustment corroborates other literature on protective factors e. Indeed, child IQ and parenting variables are among the most consistently found factors associated with prosocial outcomes for children Yates et al.

Researchers have posited that high levels of intelligence can help children contend with the stressors that they encounter in their everyday lives Masten and Coatsworth Similarly, nurturant, supportive parenting and a positive, close relationship with a parent may help children to navigate a stressful environment by providing them with valuable interpersonal and social resources Masten and Coatsworth RPRQ was the only protective factor that significantly interacted with neighborhood disadvantage to predict positive social adjustment.

High levels of RPRQ were only associated with positive outcomes for those children in the lowest neighborhood disadvantage trajectory. In contrast with expectations, neighborhood disadvantage did not moderate the relationship between child IQ, emotion regulation, nurturant parenting, and parent—child relationship quality assessed in early childhood and positive social adjustment in early adolescence.

This suggests that these latter protective factors work similarly across levels of neighborhood disadvantage. These findings are important for two reasons. First, we found only limited support for the notion that selected child and family protective factors appear to be more salient in contexts of lesser versus greater neighborhood disadvantage. In fact, three of the five protective factors explored in this study were associated with child positive outcome regardless of the level of neighborhood disadvantage.

The fact that these protective factors are operating at lower levels of risk is consistent with our predictions. However, because of the high risk nature of our sample, we did not expect that these factors would continue to be as strongly associated with positive outcomes at the highest levels of risk. For example, Gorman-Smith et al. It is important to note, however, these authors did not actually find a significant interaction between family and parenting variables, and neighborhood risk; rather, they computed separate regressions within each neighborhood type.

Second, the finding that high levels of RPRQ were associated with positive social adjustment for children only in the lowest neighborhood disadvantage trajectory suggests the possibility of a ceiling effect. More specifically, high levels of RPRQ were not associated with positive outcomes for children at the other four higher levels of disadvantage. For children at high levels of neighborhood disadvantage, RPRQ may be less critical to their adjustment relative to other stressors in their daily lives e.

RPRQ may also be somewhat removed from the immediate context of the child's life. Consequently, it may be less able to offset risk in other areas than a more proximal and all-encompassing protective factor such as child IQ, which may come into play across more situations. For example, a non-conflictual relationship between parents may help a child to feel confident and safe in the home, but it might not be enough to counteract multiple risks that the child is exposed to outside of the home.

Thus, RPRQ may be more easily overwhelmed in the context of high risk than other more proximal protective factors that may impact more areas of the child's life.

• Panel discourse?
• Geheimnisvoller Kosmos: Astrophysik und Kosmologie im 21. Jahrhundert (German Edition).
• .
• Resilience definitions, theory, and challenges: interdisciplinary perspectives.
• ;
• ?
• ?

Previous research has found that marital quality is associated with low levels of child emotional and behavioral problems e. More generally, however, the finding that positive family functioning may not serve a protective function at high levels of risk is corroborated by several studies e. For example, a study of predominantly ethnic minority, low-income boys found that low family conflict was only protective in the context of low community violence exposure Miller et al.

Similarly, Shaw et al. One of the strengths of the current study is that an objective, dynamic measurement of neighborhood disadvantage was used to define adversity. Neighborhood disadvantage was defined using US Census Bureau statistics at multiple timepoints, allowing for measurement of the chronicity and course of neighborhood disadvantage. Although it has correctly been pointed out that utilizing census data to define neighborhood disadvantage arbitrarily imposes boundaries on social contexts, it does eliminate potential reporter bias that might have occurred if we had relied on parental reports.

Most families in the study did not vary significantly over time in their level of risk, but the two highest disadvantage trajectories had negative linear slopes, indicating that for these families neighborhood disadvantage decreased significantly over time. In particular, by the age 10 assessment the high descending disadvantage trajectory had decreased to levels below that of the moderate risk trajectory. Indeed, the interaction between RPRQ and neighborhood disadvantage was found in reference to the high descending disadvantage group, suggesting that this was important pattern of risk that differed from the others.

There were a number of limitations to the present study that should be noted. First, participants were low-income, urban boys; it is unclear whether these results would generalize to girls or to children living in rural or suburban areas. Indeed, research suggests that pathways to externalizing behavior may be somewhat different for girls Pepler and Craig Given the importance of studying both conduct disorder and the effects of neighborhood on girls, future studies should include both boys and girls. Similarly, protective factors associated with positive outcomes and resilience processes may also differ by child gender and geographic context.

Second, due to low SES, the majority of the families in the study could be conceptualized as high-risk, thus it is not possible to say whether the direct relations between the protective factors and positive social adjustment hold for less economically deprived groups, or whether different or more robust interactions would have been identified within a sample covering a broader range of SES. However, as Seidman and Pedersen have pointed out, high-risk samples such as the current one allow within-group heterogeneity to be examined more closely, which can further explicate resilience processes and highlight variability in trajectories for at-risk children.

Third, sample sizes within the highest two trajectory groups were considerably smaller than the other groups, which limited power and the possibility of finding interactions between protective factors and neighborhood disadvantage. Fourth, as previously noted, unmarried mothers were allowed to complete the marital quality questionnaire on another romantic relationship, such as their boyfriend or girlfriend.

However, due to differences in measurement with other studies, the current findings regarding RPRQ may not be generalizable to other samples. This study provides important information on the relations among early child and protective factors, neighborhood disadvantage, and positive social adjustment in urban, low-SES boys.

These findings highlight the importance of examining both main effects and interactions, as both provide important information for prevention and intervention efforts.