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.
Ann S. Masten, Ph.D., LPRegents Professor, Irving B. Harris Professor of Child Development
