Resilience to Childhood Trauma
Resilience to Childhood Trauma When parents, service providers, and programs employ a resilience framework to childhood trauma, they understand there are always opportunities to support positive developmental trajectories among children, even if they have experienced trauma. Resilience has been defined as “a dynamic process encompassing positive adaptation within the context of significant adversity.” Resilience is not a personal trait that individuals do or do not possess (thus, the term “resiliency” is best avoided because it connotes an individual characteristic), but rather a product of interacting factors—biological, psychological, social, and cultural—that determine how a child responds to traumatic events. Resilience to trauma can be defined in several ways: positive child outcomes despite exposure to trauma, prevention of trauma recurrence despite high risk for further exposure, or avoidance of traumatic experiences altogether in the face of significant risk. All three of these conceptualizations of resilience are based on an ecological approach.
Using an ecological approach to promote resilience in development among children who experience trauma is useful because it assumes that there are multiple levels of influence on a child’s development—the individual, parent, family, school, community, and culture—which may increase or decrease a child’s risk for and response to experiencing trauma. These various influences are often referred to as risk and protective factors.
