There has always been an interest in trying to
figure out what really matters when children are facing adversity.
What can we do to protect our children when they encounter difficulties,
to help them recover.
And, although we know that, assets and
resources can make a difference, they help children at all levels of risk.
There's a special interest in understanding, what we can do
that might really matter in circumstances where adversity is very high.
What is especially important that protects children when they're in
very difficult situations?
And that's when the, the topic of moderators and
protective factors becomes really important.
Here is a model of a moderator.
A moderator is something that influences the relationship between an adversity or
a risk factor.
And the impact on individuals in terms of the outcomes that they experience.
So here we're looking at adversity.
Predicting good outcome, that would be negative.
In most cases adversity has a negative ou, input, or
impact on how well a child is doing, but there's a moderator here,
that is making a difference and it's affecting or
changing how the adversity is predicting changes in the outcome of the child.
And many kinds of moderators show that pattern and
have been studied in resilience science.
They include things as different in level as genes.
You can measure now the genetic characteristics of an individual.
And try to see if genetic in, variables are related to outcomes.
And there's some very interesting research suggesting that that's the case.
Or, you can measure other biological systems in a child.
A popular topic in resilience, now is looking at how stress
systems work in a child, and whether the stress systems in,
that are operating in our body alter the way in which experiences affect us,
either in the short term or the long ca, term.
People have been interested in personality.
Their are individual differences in how reactive people are to adversity.
Some people are more easy going, and some people are more stress reactive, and
that could make a difference in how children do.
But there are other levels of variables that
appear to play a very important role in resilience that are outside the child.
The, these are measures like relationships.
How close you feel to your family.
The parenting quality you're experiencing.
The family routines and practices, the cultural beliefs and
even the kind of emergency services that are available in your community and
the social policy of a community or a nation.
All of these could be and have been investigated as possible
moderators of the relationship between adversity and how a child is doing.