Resilience occurs when children experience positive outcomes despite experiencing significant risk. Risk is defined as those stressors that have proven or presumed effects on increasing the likelihood of maladjustment in children (e.g: poverty, maltreatment). Risk factors are catastrophic events. Risk factors pose a pervasive threat through deprivation of children’s basic needs. A protective factor is anything that prevents or reduces vulnerability for the development of a disorder. Vulnerability factors refer to those attributes of the individual that contribute to maladjustment under conditions of adversity. Children’s exposure to risk varies according to age. Infants are more vulnerable, yet less likely to suffer from difficulties involving their social environment, because of their lack of understanding of the situation.

There are several major risk factors:

1. Death of a parent
   This is a traumatic event for children, but there is evidence that it has a smaller effect on children than the effect of parental divorce.
2. Parental separation/divorce and inter-parental conflict
   This increases children’s risk for psychological, behavioural, social and academic problems. Risk is highest if children experience a lot of inter-parental conflicts. The intergenerational cycle of difficulties is the various implicit and explicit non-verbal and verbal ways parent communicate their traumatic experiences and their experiences of shared events traumatically.
3. Abuse and maltreatment
   Child abuse involves a significant deviation from the normative environment required for children’s successful development. Few maltreated children experience resilience.
4. Parental psychological disturbances
   Parental mental health problems and substance abuse have been linked to a variety of behavioural, socio-emotional and cognitive problems in children. These disturbances are often linked to other risks and it is difficult to entangle their effects.
5. Socioeconomic risks
   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. This is called childhood income poverty. Poverty has more detrimental effects if it is extreme and chronic. Poverty has more detrimental effects if it occurs earlier in childhood. Parental education influences the educational advantages of the family. Larger family size also increases the risk for negative child outcomes, because the same amount of resources have to be shared by more.
6. Stressful life events
   Stressful life events are a predictor of emotional problems. The more stressful life events, the higher the chance for psychological problems. Chronic life stress impacts on children’s ability to respond effectively to new stressors.
7. Children’s social context
   Neighbourhood disadvantage is associated with more internalising behaviour problems and a higher number of children in the clinical range.  Area socioeconomic disadvantage can strongly influence children’s psychiatric outcomes.
8. Societal mechanism
   Societal mechanisms, such as discrimination, racism and prejudice have been shown to negatively influence the lives of ethnic minority children.
9. Catastrophic events
   Catastrophic events disrupt children’s development. Children are often less capable of coping with the consequences of catastrophes. Children who have experienced catastrophic events can lead to normal, competent lives when placed in new environments.

Children rarely experience risk in isolation. Risks tend to cluster. A single risk factor often does not have a big impact, but the accumulation of several risk factors does. Risk accumulation is the way in which multiple risk factors have a cumulative effect on child outcomes. The dichotomous classification of risk exposure is a way of measuring cumulative risk.
 

The risks are not weighted, because the sum of risk factors is what leads to dysfunction according to the cumulative risk theory and because weighted models do not outperform unweighted models. Cumulative risk measures explain more variance in children’s outcomes than single factors.

Although it is not wise to weight risk factors, individual risk factors do vary in their impacts. The number of risk factors and not the combination of risk factors are important in predicting children’s outcomes. Risk specificity oversimplifies the complex interactions between risk factors and outcomes.

It is unclear at what level contextual risk should be measured. It can be measured at a family level, neighbourhood level, community level and so on. The level at which contextual risk is measured influences the child’s outcomes.

Protective factors are attributes of persons, environments, situations and events that relate to positive adaptation under conditions of adversity. Vulnerability factors are attributes that relate to maladjustment under conditions of adversity. Protective and vulnerability factors are the opposite ends of the same construct (e.g: parental warmth is a protective factor and parental coldness is a vulnerability factor). There are few universal protective factors of children. Factors that promote competence may vary according to the age of the child, the developmental outcome being targeted or even the general context.

There are three domains of protective factors:

The earliest models of resilience used the term protective factors as factors that promote resilience. Whether a variable is considered a protective or vulnerability factor depends on its connection with the risk variable, not in terms whether it has positive or negative qualities.  There are three main models of risk and resilience:

Social competence is the success of a person in meeting societal expectations. This includes criteria such as personal development and self-actualisation. Social competence also depends on the stage of development the child is in. There is a tendency to believe that if high-risk children do not show negative external behaviour that they have overcome adversity, but this might not be true, as they may internalize the adversity. Some researchers have suggested that in order to be called resilient, they must excel in multiple domains of competence. It is also unclear when someone is competent. Some researchers think a high-risk child is resilient when the child performs within the average of the population, while other researchers believe that a high-risk child is resilient when the child performs better than the other high-risk children. Competence at one stage of development can have a protective effect at a later point in time.

A resilience framework emphasises the promotion of competent functioning and fosters the development of policies and interventions that reflect the belief in resilient adaptation. Developmental models of intervention consider the risks, protective processes and competencies that are relevant to a specific age group. There are three types of intervention designs:

1. Risk-focused programmes
   These programmes attempt to reduce the level of risk exposure. The more risk factors that can be eliminated, the lower the probability of difficulties.
2. Asset-focused programmes
   These programmes attempt to directly provide higher quality and/or more quantity of assets in children’s lives.
3. Process-orientated programmes
   These programmes attempt to improve the most important adaptational systems for children, such as key relationship., intellectual functioning and self-regulation systems.