A Guide to Promoting Resilience in Children

Client:

The International Resilience Project and Edith Grotberg, Ph.D.

Audience:

Social workers, educators, psychologists, and other helping professionals

Goal:

Share the findings of the International Resilience Project; train helping professionals around the world in how to promote resilience in children

Role:

Developmental editing, copyediting, and some writing

"My father gets drunk. He said he was going to kill my mother and me. My mother put me with friends and ran away. I don't know where she is." (6 year old boy)

"I have to go to the hospital a lot because I have so many illnesses. I don't know if I will ever get well." (10 year old girl)

"I saw my father get stabbed by a neighbor who was mad at him." (6 year old girl)

"I am very short and people tease me at school all the time." (11 year old boy)

Day in and day out, children all over the world face situations like the ones described above. Some face stresses such as divorce or illness while others confront catastrophe - war, poverty, disease, famine, floods. Whether such experiences crush or strengthen an individual child depends, in part, on his or her resilience.

Resilience is important because it is the human capacity to face, overcome and be strengthened by or even transformed by the adversities of life. Everyone faces adversities; no one is exempt.

With resilience, children can triumph over trauma; without it, trauma (adversity) triumphs....