Developing Your Child’s Resiliency

Posted on June 13, 2008
Filed Under Child Development |

Consider that an average person spends about 20 years in a formal education setting , it would be interesting to learn how one copes better than the other. What makes one child more resilient than the other?

According to a longterm research, children who are more securely attached with their carers are more able to adapt to changing life circumstances, such as school life, than those who have less secure attachment relationships. Further details about the Minnesota Longitudinal Project, which followed children and their carers from infancy to adulthood, can be found in “The Fate of Early Experience Following Development Change” by Sroufe L A, Egeland B, Kreutzer, T 1990.

Securely attached here means children who have developed highly trusting relationships, particularly in the early years. According to child development experts, children must acquire a balance towards the positive (i.e. trust) and some of the negative potential (i.e. mistrust). When children have a strong balance towards the positive side of trust, they will be able to meet later emotional/social development with more ease and will be more likely to maintain this positive balance.

As children who are securely attached and have a strong sense of inner security grow into adolescents, they would have a solid emotional and social foundation on which to develop further (read Beardslee W R (2002): “How to protect your children from the effects of depression in the family”).

On the flip side, children whose behaviours are of extreme defiance of adults and have an inability to form any peer relationships are characteristics of those who have serious attachment and trauma difficulties.

In short, trust is the keyword. How does a child develop trust, in order for her to improve her resiliency?

From the moment your child is born, she cries to be comforted. Crying is her way of communicating her need for your help. You take the first step in establishing trust when you pacify her. Experts say if you consistently soothe your child’s distress over the years and take any anguished crying seriously, highly effective stress response systems can be established in her brain. You can help her cope well with stress in later life.

Research shows that if a child’s need for comfort is not met with emotional responsiveness and soothing, her autonomic nervous system can over time become wired for bodily hyper-arousal. This can make life stressful and exhausting and also result in physical ailments in later life such as problems with breathing (asthma), heart disease, eating and digestive disorders, poor sleep, high blood pressure, panic attacks, muscular tension, headaches and chronic fatigue. In “brain-gut studies”, there is a link of uncomforted stress in early life with irritable bowel syndrome.

Neuroscience explains when a child cries, the stress hormone called cortisol is released by the adrenal glands. If she is soothed and comforted, the cortisol level goes down, but if left to cry continuously, the level remains high. Over a prolonged period, cortisol can reach toxic levels that may damage key structures and systems in a developing brain. Cortisol is a slow-acting chemical that can stay at high levels in the brain for hours and in clinically depressed people, for days or weeks.

Research shows when a child has an over-sensitive stress response system may leave her susceptible to anxiety disorders, depression, smoking addiction and alcohol abuse in later life. This is particularly the case with children left to prolonged crying as babies and then experienced strict discipline with little warm physical affection to compensate.

Attachment Theory developed by John Bowlby in the sixties may now be further validated by findings in neuroscience. The core theme of attachment theory is that mothers (primary caregivers) who are available and responsive to their infant’s needs establish a sense of security. The infant knows that the caregiver is dependable and she experiences trust.