Serving Clatsop County

Resilience

Resilience is the ability to adjust (or bounce back) when bad things happen. Research shows resilience helps reduce the effects of Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs). Protective factors are internal and external resources that help us to build our resilience.

 

Leading researchers show that some children develop resilience – the ability to overcome serious hardship – and that others do not. Understanding why some children do well despite adverse experiences early in life is important to being able to help those who do not. That same understanding can help create more effective policies and programs that help more children reach their full potential.

Research has show that protective factors are the key to improving the social and emotional well-being of children and youth. Children who have experienced or are at risk for Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) are considered highly vulnerable but can improve dramatically when their families encourage the use of protective factors.

 

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Children who do well despite hardship typically have a biological resistance to adversity and strong relationships with important adults, their family, and their community. Resilience is a combination of many things, including individual characteristics and social environments, as well as the interaction between biology and environment. All these factors come together to build a child’s ability to cope with adversity and overcome threats.

 

Learning to cope with manageable threats is critical for the development of resilience. However, these capabilities can be strengthened and reinforced at any age.

Childhood trauma isn’t something you just get over as you grow up. Pediatrician Nadine Burke Harris explains that the repeated stress of abuse, neglect and parents struggling with mental health or substance abuse issues has real, tangible effects on the development of the brain. This unfolds across a lifetime, to the point where those who’ve experienced high levels of trauma are at triple the risk for heart disease and lung cancer. An impassioned plea for pediatric medicine to confront the prevention and treatment of trauma, head-on.

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