As I mentioned last week, I recently spoke at an orientation program for newly-appointed judges, many of whom were to begin their work in Family Court and to make decisions about child custody and placement as well as about termination of parental rights. The judges had many questions, both about psychological issues and about legal procedures. But one of the most interesting questions came after the formal presentation was over. One of the judges came up to me and said, "The people at the schools are always telling us that children are resilient. Now you say they may be harmed by their experiences. Which one is it?"
It's said that judges like one-armed psychologists because they can't say "on the other hand", but I definitely had to use both hands to answer this question. The level of resilience any child has depends on the individual child, on his or her developmental status, on other circumstances, and on the problem that might cause harm. It's not an absolute characteristic of any human being.
We use the term "resilience" to describe a person's ability to recover from potentially harmful experiences. When children seem to have a good deal of ability to experience problems but escape long-term harm, we say they are resilient. When other children seem to show long-term ill effects of the same kinds of problems, we describe them as less resilient or as "vulnerable". Although some individuals are more resilient and others more vulnerable, there is no one who is completely resilient and will have no difficulty, no matter how many and how traumatic the problems he or she experiences. The comparison I used in talking to the judge was that if he cut himself shaving, his skin would heal, showing his physical resilience. But, if he cut himself many times in the same place, or was in poor health to begin with, or was in an environment that caused skin irritation, healing would be slower and a visible scar would be a more likely outcome. Psychological resilience does not exist in an absolute sense, any more than physical resilience does.
The extent of a particular child's resilience seems to depend in part on his or her temperament-- the biologically-determined aspect of personality that helps shape responses to events in the environment. Temperamental characteristics exist and have some consistency from birth onward, and these characteristics help to determine how a child reacts to both good and bad experiences. For example, a toddler who is temperamentally inclined to have negative moods, to have trouble adapting to new things, and to be irritable may be badly affected by the same level of punishment that would be effective guidance for a child with more positive temperamental characteristics. The more negative child may be less resilient when affected by potentially harmful experiences like separation from familiar people, illness or injury, or domestic violence.
The timing of potentially harmful events also helps to determine relative resilience or vulnerability. In our presentation to the judges, my colleague and I had emphasized events involving attachment and separation in the infant, toddler, and preschool years. This is a period in development when children are especially vulnerable to experiences like many changes of caregivers, or abrupt, long-term separations from familiar people. Children whose temperaments make them more resilient will have less trouble recovering from these experiences, but all children have more difficulty as a result of separations during this age range than they would with the same experiences five years later in their lives. School-age children are indeed "more resilient" in the sense that they deal better with some kinds of separation and loss than younger children do.
Resilience or vulnerability are also affected by other events in a child's life. Separation experiences, for example, do not work alone, but have their effects in combination with other difficulties such as a mother's depression or domestic or community violence. When a child has experienced potentially harmful events, resilience can be fostered by appropriate adult support and care, while lack of adult empathy and help can make the child's recovery slower or less complete. As the work of Mary Dozier on foster care has shown, young children who have been separated from familiar caregivers benefit from foster parents who are sensitive and responsive to the child's communications, but do less well when foster parents ignore or misunderstand the child's signals showing the need for attention and comfort.
I know people find psychologists very annoying when we wave both hands and say that two apparently contradictory things are true. But in fact this is the case, especially when we are talking about child development. Human beings are complicated and are affected by many factors simultaneously. For children, developmental age differences are powerful factors that shape the effects of experience.
