Belsky (2019) defines resilient children as those who rebound from early life traumas to create successful lives. Developmentalists find that children who are resilient have a special talent, are good at regulating emotions, have high sense of self-efficacy, optimism and faith or sense of meaning. Good executive functions, social and intellectual skills are also important. Children who succeed against adversity typically have at least one close relationship with a caring adult.
In exploring risk factors for child maltreatment parents who have psychological disorders or addiction issues are at a higher risk of maltreatment. Abusive parents are often young and poorly educated. They tend to be coping with a plethora of problems from poverty to domestic violence and feel cut off from caring connections, isolated in neighbourhoods with low collective efficacy. Children’s vulnerabilities that require extra care can fan the flames of this fire. Disturbances in the attachment relationship are a core ingredient in maltreatment.
Michael Rutter defines resilience as the variation in individual resistance to environmental risk (Tronick, 2007). Many factors contribute to the development of resilience but Tronick seeks to advance the hypothesis that it develops from the infants and young child’s experience of coping with the stress of social interactions. He calls this the ‘normal stress resilience hypotheses’. It is framed by a dynamic systems perspective on the processes that regulate development, particularly the ‘interactive communication engagements’ between infants/ children and caregivers that regulate stress. This model holds the stress is part of normal developmental change and stress is part of the interactive regulatory processes that regulate the stress in developmental change. Through coping with normal developmental and regulatory stresses, children develop new coping capacities. Through this they also increase their capacity to resist normal and traumatic stress. Resilience, then, is in part determined by the success or failure of each child at coping with normal stressors. Development is unpredictable and a source of stress. In normal development this stress is not overwhelming and humans have evolved a “highlight effective dyadic (and larger) mutually regulated system for garnering energy for both maintenance and growth and for coping with stress” (Tronick, 2007, p379). This system helps garner more resources than individuals could get on their own and for “regulating stresses that individuals would not be able to regulate on their own” (Tronick, 2007, p379). This interactive system is, paradoxically, inherently stressful but not overwhelming. In coping with these normal stressors people grow coping capacities. Each individual’s unique experience with stressors leads to variations in resilience.
Allan Schore (1994) describes stress as a change or threat of change which demands adaptation by the organism. Schore describes stress as the occurrence of an asynchrony in a relational interaction in infancy (and indeed at later stages of life). A period of synchrony following the stress helps an infant recover. The sheltering of children from stress may be counter-productive for emotional development. Supporting Schore’s sentiment above, Ed Tronick has shown that interactive mismatches create stress in the caregiver-infant dyad, allowing for the development of self-regulatory skills through repair of the rupture. Environment challenge, writes Schore, create opportunities for social adaptation. A challenge of previous functioning creates a new opportunity to advance adaptive and self-regulatory abilities.
References
Belsky, J. (2015). Experiencing the lifespan. Worth Publishers
Schore, A. N. (2015). Affect regulation and the origin of the self: The neurobiology of emotional development. Routledge.
Tronick, E. (2007). The Neurobehavioral and social-emotional development of infants and children (Norton series on interpersonal neurobiology). W. W. Norton & Company.