Developmental psychology - summary of chapter 19 of an Introduction to Developmental psychology by A. Slater and G. Bremner (third edition)

Developmental psychology
Chapter 19
Risk and resilience in development

Resilience: occurs when children experience positive outcomes despite experiencing significant risk.

Historical background

The historical roots of resilience can be traced to research on individuals with psychopathology.
Many of the children with mental illness were doing well.

Risk factors

Risk factors includes:

• Catastrophic events
• Family adversities
• Economic conditions
• Exposure to negative environments

Protective factor: anything that prevents or reduces vulnerability for the development of a disorder.

Vulnerability factors: those attributes of the individual that contribute to maladjustment under conditions of adversity.

Children’s exposure to risk varies according to age.
Children in the first few years of live are highly dependent on their families.
Adolescents have larger and more varied social communities and therefore may have access to supportive environments other than family. But they are more influenced by the loss and devastation involved with war and natural disasters.

Parental bereavement

One of the most immediately traumatizing events for children and adolescents is the death of a parent.
Parental bereavement represents a permanent loss and separation from a primary caregiver.
Can be aggraveted by additional stressors.
There is evidence that parental death typically has a smaller effect on children than the effect of parental divorce.

Parental separation/divorce and inter-parental conflict

Family dissolution from parental divorce increases children’s risk for psychological, behavioral, social and academic problems.
Children who grow up in single-parent homes are less successful on average.
These differences have been found to relate to a broad range of outcomes.
Risk is the greatest for children of divorced parents who experience:

• High inter-parental conflict
• Loss of contact with one parent
• Problems with mental health of parents
• Less economic stability
• Whose parents have multiple martial transitions

Although the intensity diminishes over time, offspring of divorced and remarried families experience difficulties that extend into adolescence and young adulthood.

• Intergenerational cycle of difficulties: the various implicit and explicit non-verbal and verbal ways parents communicate their traumatic experiences and their experiences of shared events traumatically.

Children of divorced parents are more likely to have problems with family members, in intimate relations, in marriage, and in the workplace.
The divorce rate is higher and reports of general well-being and life satisfaction are lower.

Resilience is the normative outcome for children who are faced with their parents’ marital transitions.

Abuse and maltreatment

Abuse and maltreatment have developmental consequences which can be wide ranging and long lasting, including perpetration of child maltreatment.
Some children fare better than others in the aftermath of abuse and neglect.
This is likely due the heterogeneity of maltreatment experiences. Children who are older at the age of onset of maltreatment and who are exposed to shorter, less severe and pervasive experiences of abuse are more likely to experience resilience.

Parental psychological disturbances

Parental mental health problems and drug/alcohol use have been linked to a variety of behavioral, socio-emotional and cognitive problems in children.
Many of these disorders co-exist, so it is difficult to disentangle their effects on children.
Parental psychological disturbances also interfere with interpersonal relationships within the family as well as compromise family functioning.

Apart from genetic mechanisms of risk, the quality and quantity of parenting behaviors are likely the key determinants relating to the poor functioning of children and adolescents of depressed mothers.
The effects of maternal depression on positive parenting were strongest for socioeconomically disadvantaged mothers and mothers of children under 1 year of age.

Socioeconomic risks

Childhood income poverty: living in a family whose income falls below a specified level necessary for minimum coverage of basic expenses has been shown to increase the risk of negative child outcomes.
Poverty has more detrimental effects if it is extreme and chronic.
Include:

• Poor physical health
• Lower academic and school performance and attainment
• Increased likelihood of social, emotional and behavioral difficulties.

Poverty in early childhood is more deleterious to long-term achievement outcomes than poverty in middle childhood or adolescence.

Parental education influences the educational advantages of the family and their access to key educational resources and opportunities.
A larger family size, also increases the risk to negative outcomes for children.

The effects of homelessness on school achievement are chronic.

Stressful life events

Stressful life events range from the trivial to severe and from desirable to undesirable.
Although stressful life evens may have more of an impact on parents, both major and minor events contribute to variation in children’s well-being.
Chronic life stress impacts on children’s ability to respond efficiently to new stressors. Chronic stress elevates allostatic load, and this may be implicated in how early childhood exposure to cumulative stressors translates into poorer adjustment and elevated morbidity across the lifespan.

Children’s social context

Children living in impoverished urban areas are particularly at risk for experiencing a variety of difficult circumstances.
Neighborhood disadvantage is associated with more internalizing behavior problems and a higher number of children in the clinical range.

Externalizing behavior problems: delinquent activities, aggression and hyperactivity. Are directly linked to violent episodes, often learned from observing others.

Socioeconomic disadvantage can, via the resources or services available in deprived neighborhoods to the kinds of role models affluent neighborhoods can provide, strongly influence children’s psychiatric outcomes.
The peer group is one of the primary agents through which neighborhood socialization adversely affects children’s outcomes.

Societal mechanisms

The lager social context.
Like discrimination.

Catastrophic events

Catastrophic events such as war, extreme privation and natural disasters, clearly disrupt children’s development.
In such severe trauma, children experience devastation on an extreme and massive scale.
Children are often less capable of coping with the consequences of such catastrophes. They are especially vulnerable to emotional distress.
The effects of war are enduring. War-traumatized children are more likely to experience emotional and physical health problems in adulthood. But, most child survivors do not experience long-term effects.

Measurement of risk

The examination of a single risk factor does not address the reality of most children’s lives.
The effects of an isolated risk factor tend to be rather modest.

Risk accumulation

The way in which multiple factors have a cumulative effect on child outcomes.

Cumulative risk theory: the sum of risk factors rather than any single risk is what leads to dysfunction because it overwhelms the adaptive capacities of the individual.
No one risk factor is seen as more important than another.
The total effect of individual risk factors is greater than the sum of their individual effects.
The higher number of risk children experience, the worse their developmental outcomes.

Risk specificity

The specific characteristics of an individual risk factor, both in terms of its specific effect and in terms of how it interacts with specific child outcomes.
Individual risk factors vary in their respective impacts.

Adverse life events scale: a measure of life stress, composed of 25 possible events occurring in the last year over which children had little or no control of some adverse life effect.

It is mostly the quantity!

Equifinality and multifinality

Risk specificity oversimplifies the complex interactions between risk factors and outcomes.
Risk factor can influence multiple child outcomes (multifinality) and, a child outcome can be influenced by multiple risk factors (equifinality).

Levels of risk

there is lot of debate around deciding the appropriate level of contextual risk.

Protective/vulnerability factors

Protective factors: those attributes of persons, environments, situations and events that relate to positive adaptation under conditions of adversity.
Vulnerability factors: those attributes that relate to maladjustment under conditions of adversity.
These factors are opposite ends of the same construct.

Three broad sets of variables that have been found to operate as protective factors:

• Personal characteristics of the child
• Family characteristics
• External support systems

There are few universal protective factors for children.
Factors that promote competence may vary according to the age of the child, the developmental outcome being targeted, or even the general context.

Personal characteristics

Personal attributes suggested to operate as protective factors include both genetic and constitutional factors.
Personal characteristics are always active in a child’s life, but they can also influence the way children react when negative situations occur.

• Gender may modify or influence children’s responses to adversity.
  • Girls are less susceptible to emotional and behavioral disturbances. The protective effect of gender also appears to lessen with age, and is usually found in young children.
• Intellectual ability.
  Might be
• Temperament and personality characteristics operate as protective factors
  • Infant temperament may also act as a risk factor.
• Psychological characteristics such as locus of control
  • Low levels of perceived control might act as a vulnerability factor by increasing depression and anxiety
• Self-regulation has been shown to be protective for children, particularly those living in poverty.
• Self-esteem is suggested to operate as a protective factor for children exposed to risk
• Ethnic identity may help facilitate the development of competencies

Factors that moderate the effect of risk may be themselves moderated by other factors.

Family characteristics

A secure attachment has been shown to be particularly important for children exposed to adversity. The security of attachment between child an mother has been shown to differentiate between positive and negative outcomes in children experiencing risk. May also enable children to develop their capacity for resilience in the future.

The quality of parenting can also play an essential role in children’s responses to stressful situations.
Parenting may either protect children from difficult life circumstances or make them more vulnerable to adversities.
Authoritative parenting provides the most beneficial environment for children’s development.

A positive, warm and nurturing parent-child relationship may also mitigate the adverse effect.

Family-level resources such as cohesion, positive interactions and support operate as protective factors.

More distal characteristics of families also operate as protective factors.

External support systems

As children mature, external support systems play an increasingly significant role in their capacity for resilience.

• Friendships
• Peer support
• Positive school environments
• Supportive teachers
• Communities
• Nature

Theoretical models of risk and resilience

Moderator (interactive) effects models

The earliest models of resilience used the term protective factors to refer to factors promoting resilience.
To be meaningful, protective/vulnerability factors must be evident only in combination with a risk factor.
Protective/vulnerability factors are required to have an interactive relationship with the risk factor thereby either having no effect in low-risk populations or their effect being magnified in the presence of risk.
Whether a variable is considered a protective or vulnerability factor depends on its connection with the risk variable.

• Protective factors decrease the effect of risk
• Vulnerability factors increase the effects of risk

Main effects models

Models of resilience in which single factors are identified as determining whether a given child exposed to a risk has a good or a poor outcome.
Can be differentiated in terms of whether homogeneous or hetrogeneous risk samples are examined.

• Homogeneous: may examine differences between high- and low- competence children of a particular risk
• Hetrogenous: identify factors that are associated with desirable outcomes independent of the occurrence of risk.

Mediator effects models

Models that explore the role of intervening or intermediate variables on the effects of risk.
Pathways through which risk factors are related to outcomes.
Two forms of mediation with respect to how risk operates to influence outcomes:

• Deterioration: the occurrence or risk decreases the ability to function effectively.
• Mobilization: the occurrence of risk increases the ability to function effectively.

Moderator versus main/mediator effects models

Interaction effect are the distinguishing feature of resilience research.
Interaction effects identify which factors are associated with positive adaption.
This does not imply that main effects models lack insight into protective processes.
In many cases, interactions are disguised as main effects.

Developmental outcomes: competence and maladjustment

The definition of resilience depends on the outcome being assessed.
In the past, resilience has been defined according to the absence of social deviance or psychopathology.

Research on resilience has traditionally focused on defining competence in a single domain. But children who are doing well in one area may suffer in another.

The definition of resilience is dynamic and developmental in nature.

Contribution of risk and resilience research to the design of successful interventions

A resilience framework emphasizes the promotion of competent functioning and fosters the development of policies and interventions that reflect the belief in resilient adaption.

Three types of intervention designs:

• Risk-focused, attempt to reduce risk exposure
• Asset-focused, attempt to directly provide higher quality and/or more quality of asset in children’s lives.
• Process-orientated, attempt to improve the most important adaptiontional systems for children.