0:15
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.
3:51
The, the risk occurs, the threat occurs, and
then that triggers the protective factor and sets it into motion.
And there's some great examples of this kind of moderator in our everyday life.
One, one example is the air bag in
many of automobiles manufactured around the world now.
Your airbag isn't doing anything, usually when you're driving around,
except it's stored in, in the car.
But when the airbag system detects a threat that an accident is happening,
the airbag can, suddenly deploys in order to
protect you from getting bad injuries during a car accidents.
And, airbags are a kind of protective factor that
moderate the impact on the human body of a car accident.
It's a classic example of a threat-activated protective factor.
Another example would be the way your immune system works in your body.
You have, your body is capable of making antibodies.
And many of us get vaccinated, in order to protect us from diseases.
And when we're vaccinated, it stimulates our body to make antibodies to various
kinds of diseases, ranging from tetanus to measles to smallpox, whatever it is.
And then, when our body encounters that inf, infectious agent, th,
our immune system responds by protecting us.
It, the, antibodies attack.
The foreign agents and, we keep, we're able to maintain our health.
Vaccination is an extremely important kind of intervention that we'll be
talking about more later in the class.
So here's some other examples, of threat-activated protective factors that
are not automobile airbags or our immune system.
5:51
One that is very important for
children, is the way that parents respond in an emergency.
Parents are always looking after their children,
they're always promoting their pa, their development.
But in an emergency, when a parent sees that a child is in imminent danger.
A chi, a parent will respond by taking a special kind of action.
So, a parent can be a threat activated protective factor as well.
I think as you get older often your friends play the same role in your life.
If they observe that you're being threatened in some way.
They may, they respond by trying to help you out.
So, friends can be threat activated protective factors as well.
And there are emergency services for children that work this way.
In our community, we have emergency services.
If a family feels they're unable to cope with whatever's going on, in.
In their life they can call and
get emergency help from Social Services in the environment.
We also have emergency services in the context of disasters and
terrorist attacks.
Where we have first responders that come, the, you know, fire.
People, police, people,
military responses emergency services of many different kinds.
To try to respond and help people who are in the middle of an unfolding disaster.
We're also going to see in a future segment,
that interventions can be thought about as.
Threat activated protected factors as well.
7:36
We've looked at this graph before, and this is simply an example of a moderator.
And I want to tell you a little bit more about this study.
This moderating, moderator s analysis is from a study of homeless children.
I've been using research, a body of research,
on families experiencing homelessness in the course of this methods section.
And in this particular study, these were young children who were being studied, and
one of the things that was measured was parenting quality, how well is the parent.
8:14
Managing to take care of the children in the family even
though the family's in a very difficult time, living in a temporary shelter.
But, we observe many families in that situation who
are still able to take care of their children get them ready for school.
Read to them and try to ensure that they're getting the,
the sleep and nutrition their need.
Doing everything that you would hope that parents do,
even though the parent is in a very difficult situation.
And what we found in this particular study,
which was done by Jeanette Herder, Her, Herbers.
And her group is that, the children that had that really effective parenting,
9:00
were always doing better.
However, when th risk level in the family was very,
very high, that had a lot of stressful life experiences.
That good parenting mattered even more.
Because parenting quality appears to be a very powerful moderator of how
children do in the midst of adversity.
Now, we'll be hearing more about that as we go forward in the class,
in other sections on war and disaster as well.
Next time, we're going to take a look at combined models.
We've been looking at a group of person-focused models.
And a group of variable focused models.
And now we're going to look at the topic of
strategies that try to combine both those models into one study.
Ann S. Masten, Ph.D., LPRegents Professor, Irving B. Harris Professor of Child Development
