Based on a review of literature of (Rutter, 1998), it is reasonable to assume that the two concepts resilience and protective based perspective are closely linked and quite complementary. However, there is an important distinction between the two concepts. Resilience is a dynamic process or an attribute that lies within the child, the family, or the environment, whereas the protective stance describes the helping professional's representation, which serves to enhance the ability to identify and apply resilience informed assessments and interventions in practice. Unless children/families are viewed from a protective base, the practitioner is likely to miss the resilience factors associated with a particular child or family and their environment and thus be less able to build on them.
Strategies are set out for enhancing children and family services and sets key priorities for social services, education, health and other partners in order to improve services for children at risk and families in most need, particularly those living in more socially disadvantaged, culturally and ethnically diverse communities. It also builds on measures of success in working together with parents and children to agree plans and partnerships which produce real results. The objectives link closely with those set out in the Green Paper "Every Child Matters". Children's Trust policies will be a key vehicle in delivering local strategy, working closely with partners to ensure objectives are achieved.
The five key objectives of the strategy for consideration are: Protecting children from emotional, physical and sexual abuse and neglect; Promoting health and well being, ensuring healthy lifestyles, development of positive social skills and emotional resilience; Supporting achievement and enjoyment, development of skills and knowledge to enjoy childhood and facilitate social inclusion; Enabling participation and supporting responsible behaviour in the local community, economy, and services; Valuing diversity and confronting discrimination in relation to ethnicity, cultural background and ability/disability.
Preventative actions are seen as significant to improving the outcomes for children. The local councils and its partners are committed to redirecting resources to provide additional support for families and communities. It is recognised that cross linkages at the level of program planning and implementation and service delivery, will be vital to their effectiveness. A useful strategy adopts partnership building as its focus. It recognises that there are practical things that government, families and communities can do, working together, to minimise risk for children and build resilience. No government agency or non-governmental organisation, alone, can achieve outcomes for children and families, especially those with complex needs e.g. drug abuse, teenage pregnancy and parental risk factors such as depression. Consequently, there is a clear need to develop improved responses to children and to work with the community and the youth sector to develop a network that can better plan and deliver services (Home Office, 1998 pp. 2-3).
One could assume that early intervention services (National Health Services, Schools, Communities and Welfare Services) have the greatest impact when they are provided as part of a coordinated network. By facilitating integrated service responses, such as improved national and local case management arrangements, fewer children and their families will face acute problems. Proposals of increasing the range of recreational and developmental opportunities available in a given community also form an important element of a holistic response to the needs of children, young people and families in general. The types of programs developed to address local needs will depend on existing programs and community strengths, what young people and their families want in their community e.g. home based help, care and support initiatives, information and support services and how services and others join together to make decisions and take action. A particular issue for local level planning is the increasing number of young people with multiple problems for instance, who are homeless with a mental health problem and a substance misuse problem, which are not able to obtain the help they need. Better coordination between local-level services providers and improvements to the service infrastructure in communities represents a sound starting-point for addressing these issues.
During the past 25 years, a number of researchers have completed longitudinal developmental studies of large groups of children growing up in community settings (Christchurch longitude study; Fergusson & Lynskey, 1996). Within these groups of children, many characteristics of the children and families were examined, and the life course of the child was charted into adulthood. These large studies contained hundreds of children with outcomes varying from successful to extremely poor. In looking at the characteristics of children with different outcomes, the researchers (Bowlby, J. 1951) have identified consistent risk factors which are often associated with the development of negative outcomes, such as school failure, psychiatric illness, multiple hospitalisation, criminal involvement, vocational instability, and poor social relationships later in life. The risk factors repeatedly identified are Child; fetal drug/alcohol abuse, delinquency, academic failure, substance abuse, repeated aggression, medical disorders. Family Characteristics; Poverty, large family 4 or more children, parents with mental disorders, parent with criminality, parent with substance abuse. Family/experimental; Teenage pregnancies, poor infant attachment to mother, witness to extreme violence, sustained neglect, separation/divorce, single parent, sexual/physical abuse, the list continues far beyond these few named.
Risk factors do not invariably lead to problems in the lives of children, but rather increase the probability that such problems will arise. Interestingly the studies show that it is less significant which risk factors are present, but how many are present in life of a child. This suggests that when these risk factors accumulate in the life of a child, there is a tendency towards the whole range of negative outcomes, regardless of which specific risk factors are operative. It follows that the damaging effects of multiple risk factors apply across gender, race, culture and disability category. This is supported by studies in a variety of socioeconomic and demographic populations.
These survivors of risk are marked resilient children. In studying resilient children and their families, researchers are beginning to identify important features which seem to confer protection against the poor outcomes usually associated with living with many risk factors. These so called protective factors protect no matter what the child’s diagnosis, disability, or experiential risks. Studies also show that the greater the number of risk factors a child possesses the greater number of protective factors he or she needs to promote a positive outcome. Specific protective factors have been repeatedly identified by different studies of resilient children. Phelps (1988) noted that protective factors seem to fall into three general categories: The quality of the child e.g. temperament, hopes and aspirations, education; Family characteristics such as secure mother/child attachment, relationship was parents, family life routine; Social support from outside agencies to consider support from school/church; support from parents employers; support from mentor for child /family.
As study after study recognises these same risks and protective factors, researchers are calling for clinicians and service systems to shift from traditional approaches to establish new intervention efforts to prevent risks and promote protective factors (Rutter 1987). Pilot programs which pursue this direction show promise. For example, school-based programs teaching social skills and problem-solving can at least temporarily improve the functional level of high risk children. Also, programs in intensive probation, which essentially allow mentoring of juvenile offenders by probation workers with low case loads, have lower rates of recidivism. Further, in home support services, such as Family Preservation programs and in-home outreach child abuse prevention programs, capitalise on promoting goals which serve as protective factors against risk. Such pronounced positive effects outstrip many of the traditional treatment efforts of mental health and delinquency rehabilitation. Despite these successes, many human service delivery systems remain oblivious to targeting interventions directly to reduce risk by promoting protective factors.
It is not entirely certain that high risk children and families can improve functioning simply by forcing protective factors on them. After all, the resilient children of the studies (Chamberlain, 1995) can be assumed naturally resilient, enveloping protective factors without the assistance of human services agencies. While a naturally resilient child may have the social skills to engage a caring adult to serve as a mentor, another high risk child may be more likely to evade or reject caring adults who seek to mentor them. Nonetheless, the experience of field workers with high risk individuals reveals that the children and families who do manage to improve their lot do so by the acquisition of psychosocial protective factors and concentrating on long term life changes. Occasionally, the turnaround is seen as a direct result of the determined intervention of service systems, but is probably more often a result of natural forces in the child life. To the extent that a service system can duplicate the growth of protective factors in the lives of high risk individuals, it can also expect to improve long range outcomes.
In order to take a true strengths-based approach to treatment, the ideal mental health system should go beyond disability and diagnosis-specific approaches, and actively assess and promote protective factors. In this way, the general psychosocial benefits of acquiring protective factors would augment traditional therapies.
Any overview of traditional public sector mental health services makes it immediately clear that many interventions fall short of meeting the needs of high risk children. For example, weekly clinic-based individual or family therapy, group therapies, and structured treatment programs are often under utilised in the absence of providing in-home supports or one-to-one mentor relationships, which could facilitate access to such services. The traditional behavioural modification approaches used so widely in special education and mental health programs most often fail to generalise to the child’s natural environment, and are therefore probably less important than building competence and confidence, or providing a child with an enduring relationship with a caring adult. Family therapy should provide real logistical support to overwhelmed parents, foster positively in parent-child relationships, and assist in the development of household consistency. The many problems of high risk children and families frustrate traditional techniques of therapy and service delivery, but where resiliency theory is applied to deliver know protective factors, we can begin to see positive outcomes in the lives of children/families that are otherwise difficult to serve.
It should be noted that existing mental health programs are clearly helpful for lower risk children. For families who are able to regularly access services and have either motivation for involvement, or children who are easily engaged, traditional systems of care are at least effective, if not widely available. It is the persistent inability of traditional systems to adequately serve high risk children and families.
There is mounting evidence in a number of intervention/prevention programs that high risk children/families respond to strategies which provide or instill protective factors. Programs providing mentors/agencies for at-risk children (Sure Start, Juvenile mentoring, Communities in Schools and others), are achieving predictable success. It is not surprising that such programs have a positive effect on children, many of whom are from adverse home settings.
Simple provision of attention and caring by an adult is likely to be of help. While much of the role of these mentors/agencies is perceptive, and emerges naturally in the relationship with the child, it would enhance the function of mentors/agencies to focus their interventions in the realm of known protective factors.
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Reference:
Working with Children and Families:
Block 2
Block 4
Topic 2; Promoting Resilience
Topic 14; Changing Adult Relationships: the impact on Children
Topic 9; Emotional and Mental Health
Bernardes, J. (1997) Family Studies: An introduction, London, Routledge
Bowlby, J. (1951) Maternal Care and Mental Health. Geneva: World Health Organisation
Chamberlain, M. (1995) Family narratives and migration dynamics.New West Indies Guide/nieue West Indische Gids, 69 (3/4): 253-75
Chamberlain, M. (1997) Narratives of Exile and Return, London, Macmillan.
Christchurch Longitude Study
Fergusson, D.M. and Lynskey, M.T. (1996) Adolescent resiliency tofamily diversity. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 281-292.
Grotberg, 1995
Home Office (1998) Supporting families: A consultation document, London, HMSO.
Hornby, N. (1998) About A Boy, London, Indigo.
Phelps, J.L., Belsky, J. and Crnic, K. (1998) Earned security,daily stress, and parenting: a comparison of five alternative models. Development and Psychopathology, 10: 21-38
Plomin, R., De Fries, J.C., McClearn, G.E. and Rutter, M. (1997) BehaviouralGenetics (3rd edn). New York: W.H. Freeman & Co.
Rapoport, R.N. and Rapoport, R. (1982) Families in Britain, London, Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Rutter, M. (1985). Resilience in the Face of Adversity: Protective Factors and Resistance to Psychiatric Disorder. British Journal of Psychiatry. 147:598-611.
Rutter, M. (1987). Psychosocial Resilience and Protective Mechanisms. American Journal of Orthopsychiatry 57(3), 316-331.
Rutter, M. (1999) Resilience concepts and findings: implications for family therapy, Journal of family, Vol. 21, pp. 119-44.