Making for resilient youth
We have been exploring, understanding and modelling community resilience in the San Franciscan neighborhood of the Fillmore. We are a class of graduate students studying Interaction Design at the California College of the Arts. We are slowly transitioning out of the initial phase of research and presencing to assessing resilience.
My team is working with middle school youth and this has led me on a trail to understand what elements affect resilience in children.
This article by Bari Walsh on the Harvard Graduate school website led me to question the efficacy of sticking to a traditional model which repeats. For something to change something else needs to change right?
“Every child who winds up doing well has had at least one stable and committed relationship with a supportive adult.”
says a a new report from the National Scientific Council on the Developing Child, a multidisciplinary collaboration chaired by Harvard’s Jack Shonkoff. “His research shows that the developing brain relies upon the consistent “serve and return” interactions that happen between a young child and a primary caregiver. When these interactions occur regularly, they provide the scaffolding that helps build key capacities — such as the ability to plan, monitor, and regulate behavior, and adapt to changing circumstances — that enable children to respond to adversity and to thrive.
But in the absence of these responsive relationships, the brain’s architecture doesn’t develop optimally. The body perceives the absence as a threat and activates a stress response that — when prolonged — leads to physiological changes that affect the brain and overall systems of physical and mental health. The stress becomes toxic, making it more difficult for children to adapt or rebound.”
My research further led me to an article by Maria Konnikova in the New York Times that tells the story of a developmental psychologist named Emmy Werner who in 1989 published the results of a thirty-two-year longitudinal project. “She had followed a group of six hundred and ninety-eight children, in Kauai, Hawaii, from before birth through their third decade of life. Along the way, she’d monitored them for any exposure to stress: maternal stress in utero, poverty, problems in the family, and so on. Two-thirds of the children came from backgrounds that were, essentially stable and happy; the other third qualified as “at risk.” She had discovered that of the “at risk” not all of them reacted to stress in the same way. Two-thirds of them “developed serious learning or behavior problems by the age of ten, or had delinquency records, mental health problems, or teen-age pregnancies by the age of eighteen.” But the remaining third developed into “competent, confident, and caring young adults.” They had attained academic, domestic, and social success — and they were always ready to capitalize on new opportunities that arose.”
