Building Resilient Children
Contributed by CCS Early Learning, Alora E. Zulliger, PhD, Professional Development Specialist
As a community, we wish love, joy, health, and enrichment for our children. However, many of our community’s littlest ones are facing adversity in the form of income instability, homelessness, and removal from their primary guardians. In fact, 50% of the 0–5-year-old children served by CCS Early Learning, the Mat-Su Valley’s premier early childhood education organization, are either homeless or in foster care.
This early adversity can create trauma and long-lasting harmful impacts, both in terms of psychological and physical health. In their 1998 seminal study on the effects of Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs), Felitti and Anda discovered a strong correlation between childhood exposure to ACEs and adult diseases, including ischemic heart disease (the number one cause of death in the United States), cancer, and lung disease.
As Dr. Nadine Burke Harris in her acclaimed TedTalk points out, the negative impacts of ACEs are not only caused by individuals engaging in more risky health behaviors, but by the neurological ways in which these early experiences of adversity alter multiple structures of our children’s brains; one impact is on the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis which regulates the autonomic nervous system, putting our children in a state of ‘fight or flight’ even when no physical threat is present. This ultimately puts stress on many of the body’s systems and leads to the early damage of physical health. Yet hope persists.
Imagine for a moment a skill so formidable that it could assure the success of our children, allowing them to persevere through difficult developmental stages, frightening seasons, and early traumatic experiences, and to ultimately emerge from the other side stronger and even more capable of living a rich and fulfilling life.
This skill is resilience. Resilience as a concept was initially introduced by Garmezy (1991) in his ground-breaking research on the mitigation of childhood trauma. It is defined as “the tendency to ‘rebound or recoil,’ ‘to spring back,’ [and/or] ‘the power of recovery.’”
Despite our collective familiarity with the word resilience, many of us incorrectly assume that it is an innate and unchangeable quality of our personalities. We may think “this child is resilient or she’s not.” Thankfully, however, resilience can be built. Resilience can be learned through interactions with our social environments. This is tremendously heartening, as it means that we as individuals can work to help strengthen resilience in our community’s children, buffering against the impacts of negative life events.
So, what can we do to build a resilient child? Arguably the most important protective factor against ACEs is the presence of a dependable and caring adult in a child’s life, either from within or from outside of the child’s family. Caring and responsive relationships help to nurture resilience in children. When children have a dependable adult, they learn that even if bad things happen, they still have someone to rely on. At CCS Early Learning, the educators and staff not only show up in children’s lives as reliable and nurturing adults, but they also help to foster these relationships within the child’s own family. The gift you give through your reliable and caring presence is precious. A safe adult presence plays an instrumental role in mitigating the effects of childhood trauma.
Other strategies exist to build resilience in children, such as engaging them in real life tasks that allow a developmentally appropriate level of struggle (while in the presence of a safe and caring adult), recognizing individual differences, allowing exploration of new experiences, and taking a narrative approach through the use of cultural stories that explore the meaning of hardship and showcase examples of individuals/communities overcoming challenges (as per Dr. Mary Claire Heffron).
CCS Early Learning provides both Early Head Start and Head Start services to children and families in the Mat-Su Valley. As an agency, CCS is working to break the cycle of childhood trauma in our community through meaningful family engagement, comprehensive family services, and early childhood education.
We know that for many of our community’s children, their journeys may be rocky at first. While there are many ways in which we can, and are, working towards bettering the circumstances our children are born into, we can also remember that it is important to ‘prepare the children for the path, not the path for the children.’ As we show up for our children reliably and with nurturing care, we help to build within them the skill to move through any hardship they may encounter and emerge into the world strengthened.
Further Reading and Viewing:
Burke Harris, N. (2014): How Childhood Trauma Affects Health Across a Lifetime (https://www.ted.com/talks/nadine_burke_harris_how_childhood_trauma_affects_health_across_a_lifetime?language=en)
CCS Early Learning: https://www.ccsalaska.org/
Garmezy, N. (1991). Resilience in children’s adaptation to negative life events and stressed environments. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/1945543/
Felitti, V. J., Anda, R.F. et al. (1998): The Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) Study. https://www.ajpmonline.org/article/S0749-3797(98)00017-8/pdf
Raising Our Children with Kindness (R.O.C.K.) Mat-Su hosts Positive and Adverse Childhood Experiences (PACES) classes. Their free class schedule can be accessed through their Learning Opportunities webpage: https://www.rockmatsu.org/learning/