Resilience in Children at-Risk
Ann S. Masten, Professor, Institute
of Child Development, College of Education and Human Development,
University of Minnesota
How do children and adolescents "make it"
when their development is threatened by poverty, neglect, maltreatment,
war, parents disabled by physical or mental illness, or natural
disasters? The scientific study of resilience - children succeeding
in spite of serious challenges to development - emerged about 25
years ago, when a group of pioneering researchers kept bumping into
examples of successful development in their studies of children
at-risk (Masten, Best, & Garmezy, 1990). These investigators
realized that we did not understand how good outcomes are achieved,
and that this information was vital for improving the odds of these
high-risk children for productive lives.
 During
the first generation of research on resilience in development, this
phenomenon has been studied in a variety of situations throughout
the world (Masten, 1994). Many lessons have been learned and
results have yielded both striking consistencies and questions for
the future. For a time, researchers explored single risk factors,
such as premature birth, divorce or abuse, but it soon became evident
that risks like these rarely come in single packages. Negotiating
such challenges is an extended process, not a single event.
Children are more typically at-risk due to multiple adversities
extending over time, sometimes very long periods of their lives.
Divorce, for example, is not a single adversity but often a lengthy
process of multiple stressors and changes occurring before, during,
and after the divorce itself.
Investigators have learned that outcomes
generally worsen as risk factors pile up in children's lives, and
concomitantly, resilience becomes less common (Egeland, Carlson,
& Sroufe, 1993; Garmezy & Masten, 1995; Masten & Wright, 1997).
At catastrophic levels of trauma, no child is expected to be resilient
until a safe and more normative environment for development is restored.
Thus, in cases of massive trauma due to war or chronic child abuse,
resilience refers to good recovery after trauma has ended.
Moreover, it is possible for a child to be resilient and still suffer
from residual effects of trauma. Resilience does not mean
"invulnerable" or "unscathed!"
Research shows that children have different
vulnerabilities and protective systems at different points in development.
Infants, because of their total dependence on caregivers, are highly
vulnerable to the consequences of lost or damaged parents or mistreatment
by caregivers. Yet infants are protected from experiencing
the atrocities of war or the significance of major disasters by
their lack of understanding of what is happening. Adolescents
have much more advanced capabilities for adaptation in the world
on their own. However, they are vulnerable to loss or devastation
concerning friends, faith, schools and governments. They understand
what these mean for their future, a realization well beyond the
understanding of young children.
Longitudinal studies provide the most important
information about resilience in development. A landmark study
now spanning four decades has followed the development of children
born on the Hawaiian Island of Kauai in 1955. It has provided
a wealth of data on protective factors for good development in children
with high cumulative risk (Werner, 1993). In this study, the
risk group (about 1/3 of the children) was defined by having four
or more early risk factors that included poverty, perinatal stress,
family conflict, and low parental education. About 1/3 of
these high risk children developed well in terms of getting along
with parents and peers, doing fine in school, avoiding serious trouble,
and having a good mental health. The resilient group had more
resources and fewer adversities from an early age. They had
good parenting, more time before the next child in the family came
along, more appealing temperaments as babies, better intellectual
skills, more connections with prosocial adults, fewer separations
from caregivers, better physical health, etc. They also were
more responsible, self-confident and motivated to achieve.
They took advantage of opportunities such as military service or
community education to shape their lives in positive ways.
As the resilient group has grown up, their
competence has endured and continued to flower in adult form.
Yet there have been some signs of strain that may reflect long-term
consequences of severe adversity in early childhood: Resilient
adults from troubled families appear to be more cautious about marriage
and intimacy, and also report health problems that could be stress
related.
The possibility that resilient individuals
may not escape adversity unscathed has been examined in a study
of competent inner city adolescents by Luthar (1991). She
found that most competent youth, struggling daily with the burdens
of poverty and often racism, had signs of internal distress.
This suggests that youth pay a toll in the struggle to overcome
adversity, exacted from either the level of adversity itself or
the strain of rising above it. Studies of Cambodian youth
who survived the holocaust in their country to immigrate to Minnesota
also suggest there may be long term consequences of severe adversity.
Years after their war experiences many of these youth still have
symptoms of trauma and emotional disturbance, including nightmares,
difficulty concentrating, horrifying memories, jumpiness, or times
of great sadness (Hubbard et al. 1995). At the same time,
these young survivors are getting on with their lives, going to
college, making friends, and building constructive lives as they
adapt to life in Minnesota. Their lives are a testimony to
the astonishing human capacity for resilience.
Our longitudinal study of resilience in
205 Minnesota children, though quite different than the Kauai study,
paints a strikingly similar portrait of what makes a difference
for development under adversity. In Project Competence, we
have followed a group of Minneapolis school children from elementary
school to the brink of adulthood, gathering extensive information
on multiple domains of competence, including "work" (academic versus
prosocial rule-abiding behavior), and "peer social competence" (acceptance
and friendships with peers and later romantic relationships).
We gathered extensive information about the stressful experiences
these children faced in their lifetimes. This has made it
possible to compare competent children growing up with little adversity
to resilient children growing up with very high levels of adversity
to maladaptive children, who have not successfully overcome adversity.
We have learned that resilient children
and adolescents have much in common with other competent children
in spite of the differences in life experiences. Both groups
of successful children have a history of more resources than maladaptive
children. In particular, average or better intellectual skills
and good parenting appear to be crucial for good outcomes in more
than one competence area. Children who floundered had few
individual or family resources that appear to protect human development.
They also appeared to be more vulnerable to stress in childhood,
already showing signs of being easily upset and having worse attention
skills than their competent peers. As they grew older, they
began to contribute to the stress in their own lives through their
own behavior or choices.
In Project Competence, resilient youth
do not show internal signs of distress. Their self-worth and
emotional health during adolescence and early adulthood was the
same or better than other competent youth who did not have to overcome
adversity. The more competent resilient group had positive
self-images and felt better as if success in the world also had
internal rewards. Other studies have found the same positive
"inside" story on resilience. We do not know why some resilient
youth, as in these studies, show good motional health while other
resilient youth suffer more distress. This is an important
question for future research.
Research Identifies Protective Factors
Results from these and many other studies
of resilient children and youth point to a small set of crucial
protective factors for human development (Masten, 1994; Masten
et al. 1990). The most important protective resource for
development is no surprise, it is a strong relationship with
a competent, caring, prosocial adult. The most important
individual quality is probably normal cognitive development,
which has emerged as a key factor in many forms in the literature
including average or better IQ scores, good attention skills,
and "street smarts." Research shows that catastrophic
stressors can threaten the integrity of a child's ability to
think and solve problems; but if good parenting (by parent or
others) and good cognitive development are sustained, human
development is robust even in the face of adversity.
The "short list" of human protective
factors, repeatedly found across diverse studies and samples,
include connections to positive role models, feelings of self-worth
and self-efficacy, feelings of hope and meaningfulness of life,
attractiveness to others (in personality or appearance), talents
valued by self and others, faith and religious affiliations,
socioeconomic advantages, good schools, and other opportunities
to learn or qualify for advancement in society. Good fortune
has not been systematically investigated but undoubtedly plays
a role in surviving some adversities and finding mentors outside
the family. Also, difficult to study but clearly a protective
factor, is the knack resilient individuals have to seek out
people and environments that are good for their development,
a kind of "niche seeking."
Implications For Action
What do the models of risk and resilience
emerging from the first generation of research imply for intervention,
education, and policy?
First, given the high likelihood of
multiple risks within a child's life, prevention programs will
need to target multiple risks. "Cumulative protection"
strategies are being developed for prevention (Coie et al, 1993;
Masten & Wright, 1997; Yoshikawa, 1994). Second, adding
resources in a child's life may effectively counterbalance high
risk. The Search Institute programs for asset-building
in communities provide an example of this strategy on a large
scale (Benson, Galbraith, & Espenland, 1995). Third, intervention
must tap into protective factors for development. Child/mentor
relationships or more personal school environments that encourage
closer child/teacher bonds are examples of fostering protective
relationships. Giving children opportunities to learn
about their talents and to experience mastery in learning taps
the self-efficacy/learned hopefulness systems that motivate
human adaptation.
The study of resilience makes it clear
that we cannot overlook the positive assets of children in our
assessments. An assessment must include the building blocks
of resilience and recovery as well as the risks, symptoms and
problems in a child's life. In doing so, we need to remember
that children live multifaceted lives within multiple contexts
- in families, schools, peer groups, baseball teams, religious
organizations, and many other groups. Each context is
a potential source of protective factors as well as risks.
Remember, too, that development itself is a context and that
the nature of risk, vulnerability, and protective processes
change and shift as development unfolds. We need different
strategies to promote resilience in four-year-olds versus 14
year-olds!
Resilience research illuminates the
lives of successful high-risk children in a time of growing
concern about the effects of poverty, homelessness, maltreatment,
and violence on development and the consequences of youth problems,
including teenage pregnancy, school failure and crime for youth
and for society. We have learned that children are protected
not only by the self-righting nature of development, but also
by their own actions and the actions of adults. Adult
behavior plays a central role in a child's risks, resources,
opportunities, and hence, his or her resilience.
The study of resilience offers both
hope and guidance to those who seek to improve the odds of favorable
child development. At the same time, there is growing
respect for the complexity of the process that influence the
course of human development and the difficulty of implementing
change in dynamic systems in which children develop. The
challenge faced by the next generation of researchers is to
successfully apply the lessons learned from naturally occurring
resilience to change the course of development among children
who have little chance for resilience without intervention.
References
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