In this segment I want to talk about three early landmark studies in the science of resilience that have had an enduring impact on what we know about resilience in children and how, and the research that followed. The first one is widely viewed as one of the most important longitudinal studies ever done on resilience, still ongoing. This is the study of the children of Kauai, which is a Hawaiian island, that was carried out by Emmy Werner and Ruth Smith over many, many years. This is the study of a birth cohort, a group of children that were born in 1955, on one of the Hawaiian Islands, Kauai, and they were followed over time. And initially, the, the, this was a study of risk. And they were very interested in collecting data on the kind of risk factors that might affect, health and development. Risk factors that included whether or not you had healthcare, poverty, whether there was conflict in your family, that sort of thing. But very quickly this turned into a really important study of resilience. As what happened in many of the classical risk studies, when you had pioneers like Emmy Werner, who recognized resilience that they could see all around them, they realized that the outcomes of children in this study, who they had identified as high-risk children, varied. There was a lot of variation in how the children developed over time. And they realized that a, a sizable proportion of the children were doing well and they wanted to understand what made a difference in those children. So they measured multiple risks, but they also measured many other features of the children's lives that could be potential protective factors for the children. And they identified the characteristics of resilient young people. And many of their observations have been replicated in other studies around the world. Here's a little sample of their findings. Multiple books have come out of this study so I'd encourage you to read those. But some of their major findings were in terms of these protective factors in different periods of development are listed here. One was close relationships with caregivers and other competent and caring adults throughout the, the lives of these young people. They also found, in their study, that children who had, appealing personalities seem to gather up resources very well from the environment. They found that children who were engaged and motivated did well in general in life, particularly in school. And the same thing was true for gurd, good learning skills. Good cognitive skills made a difference when these children entered school and the children who had the capabilities to learn no matter how high risk their background was were able to find a place at school and flourish, especially when they had good teachers. Children as they grew older, the resilient children, many of them developed optimistic outlook on life. They developed faith and strong religious affiliations. And they could see that there were varying pathways to resilience. Some of the children in the, in the Kauai study showed resilience all the way along from a very early age. They did well. But they also observed that there were children who got off track earlier in development, particularly in those adolescent years, and then turned their lives around as they made the transition to adulthood. They, they were what we will be calling, in this course, late bloomers. And they were very interested in what makes the difference. How do you explain these turnaround cases that manage to turn their lives in a new direction as they move into adulthood? Another very important study in the history of resilience is the work on the Buffalo Creek disaster. This disaster occurred in the, in the morning of the 26th of February in 1972, and it, it happened in a community that was in a coal mining area. And there was a creek, Buffalo Creek, and a hollow running down the side of, steep sides of hills and at the top of that hollow was a, a dam made of the residual from coal mining, a coal slurry dam. And it was just a piled, res, residuals and leftovers from coal mining. So it was kind of a mud dam. And after, there had been a lot of rain right before this happened. And all of a sudden that dam gave way and a huge wall of water flooded down through the hollow destroying everything in its pathway, all the little towns and live, communities along the way. The flood killed 125 people outright, injured about 1,100. And it left thousands of people homeless, because the whole, all the communities along the way were devastated. This flood was studied in great depth, its impact on the people of this area, because there was litigation involved. There were lawsuits brought against the coal mining companies involved, because there were concerns that the dam hadn't been constructed, but also, of course, a lot of rain was involved in this flood. There was lots of data collected by both sides of the litigation, and there was also follow-up studies done, so there's a lot of longitudinal data available from this disaster. And one, it documented in great detail some of the effects for, for the first time on children and their caregivers. There was concern because lawsuits were involved that the data might not be reliable. But it's turned out that many of the findings from Buffalo Creek disaster have been replicated in many other studies of disasters around the world. Here are some of their most widely replicated findings. They observed dose effects in the aftermath, that the more children were exposed to loss and traumatic experiences and death and destruction, the more symptoms they showed. That's a dose effect. And we're going to talk more about dose effects over the rest of this course. They also observed age differences. Generally, older children and adolescents show greater trauma symptoms and distress in the aftermath of this kind of disaster, perhaps because they understand more deeply what's going on. In some ways young children are protected from a full understanding. However there are some areas in which young children show distinct symptoms. For example, very young children often learn skills like going to the toilet that they may have learned, some of their developmental skills they regress and they may start wetting the bed. Young children often have nightmares and things, as well. And young children also react very badly to, of course, losing the care, their parents and their caregivers. They also saw that children could show trauma symptoms, just like has been, has been observed in other classic studies of resilience. The, you know, for a long time people wondered if children could show trauma reactions to devastating experiences like this, but it became clear that they could. They showed all kinds of trauma symptoms, some different than adults and some the same as adults. They showed, for example, problems with nightmares and sleeping. Some of the children couldn't sleep when it rained, for example, after this terrible flood, which they associated with rain. There are also gender differences observed, and these gender differences have been widely replicated as well. Girls often showed more symptoms of what's called internalizing symptoms, more anxiety, more depression. They often showed more severe symptoms. Boys, on the other hand, often showed what they called, in this work, belligerence, more disruptive, aggressive behavior. More conduct problems and acting out. But many other studies of boys and girls suggest that these kind of differences in behavior are widespread in many different situations, not just in the aftermath of disaster. In this study they also observed that how well the children were doing after, shortly after, and long after this experience, depended a great deal on how the parents were doing. So that family and parent functioning mattered for the children. And again that would be replicated in many other studies. There was a 17-year follow-up, which you can read about. And it was very interesting to see what are the long term effects. How do the symptoms of trauma endure over time? And they did find that for most of the children exposed, there were, there was some residual effects that they could observe after 17 years. Some people continued to have symptoms of trauma. However, most of the young people affected by this flood had recovered and gotten on with their lives. So they observed a great deal of resilience, even though the children did remember and have experiences and recollections that were stressful from their exposure to this flood. The last, example I want to give you to illustrate some of the classic findings is another study of a natural disaster. In this case fire, bushfires in Austrail, Australia. These occurred in 1983. Devastating break out of fires that caused great loss of life and injury, and many people had to flee. These fires were moving so quickly, they had to flee from the fires. And McFarlane did another of one of the most important studies in the history of resilience, because shortly after the bushfire disaster McFarlane was able to do a study comparing school children, these were primary school children, who from areas highly exposed to the bushfire. With children in the, you know, in Australia, the same region of Australia who had low, much lower exposure, lower direct exposure, to the bush fires. So it's one of the best comparison group studies. And here, again, they not only studied the children right after, shortly after the bushfires, but they did a 20-year follow-up, where they recently published their findings. And a come, there come many striking findings from this work. I just want to mention two of them. One is that they observed again as, as researchers had observed during World War II, that one of the most important factors for children in the midst of something this scary is separation from caregivers. The children did much better who were not separated. It's inevitable in this kind of life-threatening situation that sometimes children get separated from their parents, but they found that the children who were in close proximity with their parents just simply responded better. They, they had a easier time than the children who experienced the bushfire and got separated from their parents. They did see enduring effects, some enduring effects from this fire experience. Certainly people, most people recalled it. But by and large, as in other long term studies, they found that over time most of the bad reactions to the bush fire subsided and most of the children grew up and showed recovery and resilience. So a number of these studies suggest that resilience aft, in the aftermath of even devastating experience, experiences, is common. And we will be exploring that theme more throughout the course. [SOUND]
