Welcome back everyone. From the very beginning, the science of resilience was motivated by a desire to help children and learn what we could in order to promote their well being and success in life. And over the years we've learned a great deal. But children cannot wait for science to figure out everything there is to know about resilience. They're children at any given time, in the world as I stand here speaking who need help now. So, how do we, you know, use the science to develop programs that will help these children? Well over the years people have asked these questions many times, can we promote resilience, can we cultivate the capacity for positive development. And I think the answer is yes. And while we wait for more and more science to inform our efforts, we have a lot of information we can go on now. And over the years, some guidelines have emerged for how to promote resilience. And what I've put together for you here, is a resilience framework for action. This is a general set of guidelines you can use to think about your own efforts or programs to promote resilience in children. These are very general. And of course in all cases of programming or interventions it's important to evaluate and to do science about how effective your interventions are. But I think that the ideas and findings coming out of resilience have had a transformative effect, and I think they point to these what I call five Ms that form some guidelines for how to go about promoting resilience in children. And the first of these is to frame a positive goals. This is the mission. M is for mission here. It's important to focus on the positive for a number or reasons. First of all, in my experience families, children and also all the other stakeholders involved in resilience in young people are much more motivated by positive goals. By the idea of success and promoting positive development. It's much easier to get parents children as well as staff onboard for programs that are focused on the positive. And most of the things we're concerned about in child development, either can be put in terms of positive goals, like succeeding in school, or they can be reframed. We may want to prevent illness, for example, but that goal can be reframed as promoting or restoring health and positive well being. Similarly most of our goals to prevent specific problems. For example to prevent violence to prevent certain kinds of risky behaviors, can be framed in terms of what are actually trying to achieve that is different from those negative outcomes. We want to promote positive development, promote gun safety, promote peaceful skills in conflict resolution, just to give you a few examples. And I think that many people who intervene and do develop programs for children, have discovered and shared their views that this kind of positive approach, even though it doesn't neglect. Reducing risk factors is very appealing to stakeholders. The second M is to make sure that your models include positive ingredients, positive influences and positive outcomes. And we've talked quite a bit about this in the unit about methods in resilience. It's important to focus and develop models and include the positive objectives that you're looking for, but also measures of strengths along the way. And we'll talk more about this in a moment. It's important to measure those positive ingredients and outcomes as well. It's important to assess not just the problems as children go along in life or in your program but also their, their achievements, their positive progress. It's important to measure strengths in the systems that you're assessing. And this also will shift the focus of everyone toward a more positive model in and of itself. Measure gains and achievements and not just problems and failures. The third M is methods. It's important to consider a number of different strategies for positive change that have been shown to be important in the science we have on resilience. There are three basic strategies, I think, you could consider. One is to focus on risk. Risk reduction. Risk prevention. A second basic strategy is to focus on assets. Putting more resources and positive factors, promotive factors into a child's life. And the third is more process oriented, trying to harness the powerful engines for change that we've discussed in terms of ordinary magic along the way in this class. We're, in the next session, we're going to talk in a little more detail about these strategies. The fifth M stands for multiple. It is important to consider multiple levels, multiple strategies. And to involve multiple disciplines in our frameworks for intervention, in terms of resilience. And that's because resilience itself, derives from many systems and many levels. Resilience comes from individual interactions, and families systems, and cultures and religions, and many other other systems in human life. And we have to keep in mind that multiple sectors and multiple disciplines may play an important role in thinking about what to do to promote resilience. Sometimes the leverage for change, may be at a level or in a system in a child's life that you might not have the expertise to address. So it's important to bring teams of people together often, to try to promote resilience. And keep in mind that multiple levels and multiple systems are involved in promoting resilience in children. This need to coordinate, to collaborate, to consider multiple systems also suggests that collaboration itself is very important as we think about a general framework for promoting resilience. In the science, it appears that most of the effective programs often target multiple systems. They aren't single system focused by and large, many of the interventions that have evidence that they work often have a multiple level aspect to them. They intervene with child and family or the way the child and family interact or the way the family and school interact or other kinds of multiple system focus. And that's probably because a lot of the adversities and risks that threaten child development have multiple components to them. We've talked about cumulative risk and the toll it can take on child development, so it makes sense that, in order to counter cumulative risks, we may need to have a multikle, multiple component interventions that consider more than one system. And because no one person has the knowledge and expertise on multiple systems, it becomes very important that we're able to collaborate and I think that, you know efforts to put together teams of people to intervene to bring together other stakeholders can be very powerful. And this also means that we need to make sure that our students and professionals have experience and training, in effective collaboration across sectors and disciplines. In the next section, I'm going to focus more on the strategies for intervention. And some other aspects that are important to consider including what to target and how to time interventions when you're trying to promote resilience. [SOUND]
