Resilience in Children: Developmental Perspectives.

Ann S Masten,Andrew J Barnes

doi:10.3390/children5070098

Abstract

Advances in developmental resilience science are highlighted with commentary on implications for pediatric systems that aspire to promote healthy development over the life course. Resilience science is surging along with growing concerns about the consequences of adverse childhood experiences on lifelong development. Resilience is defined as the capacity of a system to adapt successfully to challenges that threaten the function, survival, or future development of the system. This definition is scalable across system levels and across disciplines, applicable to resilience in a person, a family, a health care system, a community, an economy, or other systems. Robust findings on resilience in childhood underscore the importance of exposure dose; fundamental adaptive systems embedded in the lives of individuals and their interactions with other systems; developmental timing; and the crucial role of healthcare practitioners and educators as well as family caregivers in nurturing resilience on the “front lines” of lived childhood experience. Resilience science suggests that human resilience is common, dynamic, generated through myriad interactions of multiple systems from the biological to the sociocultural, and mutable given strategic targeting and timing. Implications for pediatric practice and training are discussed.

Highlights

Evidence continues to accumulate on the short- and long-term risks to health and well-being posed by adverse life experiences in children, when adversities are prolonged, cumulative, or occurring during sensitive periods in early neurobiological development [1,2,3,4,5]
With strong evidence of processes that might contribute to resilience, investigators were able to test the promise of interventions to foster resilience in randomized controlled trials, gathering further evidence on the mutability of targeted processes
Many of the salient protective influences identified by clinical researchers pioneering this research domain remain salient today, there have been major advances in technology for studying the processes involved at multiple levels of analysis, including epigenetic change, stress regulation, or dyadic interactions between parent and child

Summary

Introduction

Evidence continues to accumulate on the short- and long-term risks to health and well-being posed by adverse life experiences in children, when adversities are prolonged, cumulative, or occurring during sensitive periods in early neurobiological development [1,2,3,4,5]. There is growing concern about the impact of disasters, war, poverty, pandemics, climate change, and associated displacement on the global well-being of children [6]. This confluence of threats to the present and future health of children and, concomitantly, their societies may be motivating a surge of global interest in resilience that spans multiple sectors and sciences [7,8,9,10,11,12]. The purpose of this article is to highlight the meaning and significance of an integrated and developmental systems perspective on resilience in human development, with particular implications for pediatric research, practice, and training.

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