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The number of children in the United States who grow up in conditions of chronic poverty and social disadvantage remains a tragedy of epidemic proportions. Currently, approximately one out of every five children under age 18 lives in poverty (Proctor & Dalaker, 2003; DeNavas-Walt, Proctor, & Smith, 2008). Further, the overall numbers grew by approximately 400,000 from 2001 to 2002, to exceed 12 million children and youth who now live below the poverty line. When those who are considered “near poor”—calculated by the U.S. Census as those who have household incomes of less than 1.25 times the poverty income level—the percentage of all children below the age of 18 in the United States who experience serious economic hardship each day of rates edges close to one-quarter (22.3) of all children and youth. Poverty rates among minority children are even higher, with this level of severe economic disadvantage affecting approximately 30% of both Hispanic and African-American children (Proctor & Dalaker, 2003; DeNavas-Walt et al., 2008). Studies of the effects of poverty and other forms of socioeconomic disadvantage have underscored the potentially devastating impact that these conditions can have on the emotional, physical, and intellectual development of children and youth (cf. Felner et al., 1995; Felner, Silverman, & Felner, 2000; Lipina & Colombo, 2009; Mrazek & Haggarty, 1994). Summarizing these findings, Schorr (1988) concluded “poverty is the greatest risk factor of all. Family poverty is relentlessly correlated with school-aged childbearing, school failure, and violent crime…. Virtually all other risk factors that make rotten outcomes more likely are also found disproportionately among poor children” (p. xxii). Little has changed since Schorr wrote those words to change the prognosis for children in poverty. Indeed, as we will discuss below, because of changes in society many of the conditions that have been associated with poverty, such as school failure, may be more likely to result in other compounding, comorbid difficulties than at any time in our nation’s history.

Elsewhere in this volume there are extended discussions of approaches to building specific competencies, or specific supports (e.g., parental skills) to enable all children and youth, including those in poverty, to better withstand stressors and challenges, including ones from both nature and nurture (Deater-Deckard, Ivy & Smith, 2005), that they confront as they develop. It is neither the intent nor within the scope of the current chapter to cover that same ground in significant detail, except to refer to it as necessary. Rather, our intent is to offer a framework for more fully understanding the pathways by which poverty impacts and shapes the developmental course for children and youth, one that has shown promise for guiding both policy and other interventions that may be effective in reducing the ongoing toll of poverty among our young. To be sure, what is offered here is but one element of what must be a far more extensive and comprehensive approach to enabling children and youth to be resilient in the face of the myriad of developmentally hazardous conditions that are associated with living in poverty. Further, the discussion offered here, although potentially making a useful contribution to considering the impact of poverty in nonwestern countries would be vastly different both in its focus and recommendations, although the transactional–ecological perspective is one that does generalize to the basic developmental processes of all living organisms, and in that way may have some utility.

As we considered where to focus the discussion in this chapter, of such a vast area (poverty), about which so much has been written, perhaps what was easiest to decide was what it did not need to do. Another chapter recounting all of the ills associated with poverty, or that had little utility for guiding action, was one thing that we clearly do not need. There are literally hundreds, if not thousands of government and public/private sector reports that recount the costs and impacts of poverty for children, adolescents, families, and others. This chapter does not do that. Similarly, it is not about the definitions of poverty, and we leave that to the economists. Instead, our focus is on the ways in which chronic disadvantage may act both directly, and through other social institutions, to negatively impact the developmental course of children and youth, as well as to offer some general understandings and specific examples of how we may reduce the population-level impacts of disadvantage.

A Mediated Effects Approach to Defining and Understanding the Experience of Poverty in Childhood and Adolescence

Transactional (Felner & Felner, 1989; Sameroff & Fiese, 1989) and ecological perspectives on human development (Bronfennbrenner, 1979), taken together as a transactional–ecological perspective (Felner, Felner, & Silverman, 2000), provide an important organizing theoretical framework for understanding the ways in which conditions such as poverty and correlated forms of social and economic disadvantage (e.g., parental educational and occupational attainment) may impact adaptational outcomes. Here, it is important to distinguish poverty and related forms of socioeconomic disadvantage from other, conceptually distinct aspects of the ecology of child and adolescent development (Bronfennbrenner, 1979; McLoyd, 1990, 1998). In articulating this view, Felner et al. (2000) noted that social structural stress, major life events, and associated conditions from which they may derive, such as the forms of disadvantage noted earlier, are “distal” in that they do not directly describe the life circumstances and demands that result from them, nor the adaptive processes they require. That is, although there may be some conditions for which “poverty” may, for all children and youth, increase the marginal probability of experiencing, to talk about the experience of “poverty” can be very misleading.

Illustratively, given poverty’s economic definition, where the level of income for a family is often the “yardstick,” a family where the primary breadwinner is a well-educated, but new school teacher with several children can easily be seen as potentially meeting the standard for being either “in poverty” or at least “near poverty.” Similarly, within the group of children/youth in poverty may be in families where the parent(s) is very young, has little education, few other resources, and yet have approximately the same income.

Families with the same income levels may also live in dramatically different communities where the developmental contexts experienced by their children may vary significantly. Kozol (1991) and others have talked about the “Savage inequalities” that may be present in the educational settings that are provided to students in neighborhoods and communities where pervasive poverty and social disadvantage are present. At the “next level” of the ecology of communities, Wilson (1987, 1996) and Xue, Leventhal, Brooks-Gunn, and Earls (2005) have shown the way that neighborhoods with high levels of unemployment, “dense” or “concentrated disadvantage” may be developmental contexts where the effects of family poverty are potentiated and magnified. Such neighborhoods often have substandard housing where high lead or other toxin levels may be present, significantly greater levels of crime, substance abuse and violence, fewer high quality after-school or childcare options, and they may also provide exposure to fewer positive models or opportunities that shape the dreams and aspirations of youth. It is also clear from both the works of Wilson (1987, 1996) and census reports that for some poverty or near poverty is a transitory experience, often persisting less than 1 year. For others, however, it may be ongoing, pervasive, and characterize much or all of the developmental period from prenatal to maturity. What is clear from the work of Sameroff and his colleagues (Masten & Sesma, 1999; Sameroff & Chandler, 1975; Sameroff & Fiese, 1989) is that exposure to additional conditions of risk is not simply additive in their impact but may, in fact, exponentially increase the probability of developmental difficulties. Hence, to discuss resilience in the face of poverty requires a framework that both reflects a full awareness of the “nested” and variable nature of poverty and that may guide action for affecting resilience in the vastly different contexts and conditions that may be associated with it.

According to this perspective, it is the more proximal person–environment transactions and developmental circumstances that define the particular experience of poverty by a child or adolescent. And, it is those immediate, day-to-day experiences that most directly shape the adaptation of youth and the developmental challenges that they confront (Abelev, 2009; Felner, Farber, & Primavera, 1980, 1983). Many of us know people who have said that they, “…were poor as a child, but did not know it. We didn’t know it because there was always food, the same house (housing stability), a safe place to play, and clean clothes.” But, for others who have grown up in poverty the developmental contexts were far more harsh.

There are several important implications of this view. First, conditions of social and economic disadvantage may, at least in part, exert their impact on adaptational outcomes via their effects on the relatively more proximal environmental conditions and experiences that characterize the lives of youth. The conceptual model implied by this view is one in which conditions of socioeconomic disadvantage influence proximal environmental experiences, and the same proximal experiences, in turn, have effects on child and adolescent adjustment. The model also allows for the possibility of direct effects of conditions of socioeconomic disadvantage on adjustment.

A second implication is that the more proximal developmental contexts (e.g., schools, neighborhoods, families) may provide and create powerful “compensatory effects” (Abelev, 2009; Costello, Swendsen, Rose, & Dierker, 2008; Felner et al., 1995) that are not only protective in their own right, but that provide developmental experiences that facilitate the development of individual level competencies in the children and youth in them, and that then magnifies the potential for positive outcomes. Here, we see the opportunity for the compliment to “rotten outcomes cluster.” That is, where developmentally enhancing, compensatory settings are provided, “strengths may magnify in reciprocal ways between through transactions that enhance both protective features of the context and individual strengths of the inhabitants.”

As noted, consistent with the hypothesized ecological–mediational linkages in the proposed model, numerous prior investigations have established both: (a) associations between indices of household socioeconomic disadvantage and the relatively more proximal experiences of children and youth in primary developmental contexts, including, but not limited to, heightened levels of parent–child conflict, family disorganization, negative experiences in school, and greater degrees of exposure to both acute and potentially chronic stressors (Garmezy, 1983; Mash & Dozois, 2003; McLoyd, 1998; Sameroff & Fiese, 1989; Sameroff, Seifer, Barocas, Zax, & Greenspan, 1987), and (b) associations between indices of proximal environmental experiences in many of these same domains and various aspects of child and adolescent adjustment including, but again not limited to, relative levels of self-esteem, symptoms relating to depression and anxiety, behavioral problems in home and school contexts, and academic achievement (Cicchetti, Rappaport, Sandler, & Wessberg, 2000; DuBois, Felner, Brand, Adan, & Evans, 1992; Felner, Aber, Primavera, & Cauce, 1985; Mash & Dozois, 2003; Nolen-Hoeksema, Girgus, & Seligman, 1992; Rowlison & Felner, 1988).

Findings from the relatively few studies which have examined patterns of association among all three types of variables provide some support for distal-proximal-adjustment mediated pathways (see McLoyd, 1990, for an excellent review of this literature). In her review, which focused on the effects of economic hardship among African-American families and children, she concluded that there was support for the hypothesis that the socioemotional functioning of children living in poor families is mediated by the effects of poverty on proximal contextual conditions in children’s lives, such as the psychological functioning of ­parents and levels of distress in family interaction patterns. Of particular note for a mediated pathways perspective are those studies which have found that measures of relatively distal environmental factors no longer relate significantly to adjustment outcomes after their shared variance with key proximal conditions is removed. For example, in reviews of the literature concerning conduct disturbances several authors have, over the years (Hinshaw & Lee, 2003; Rutter, 1979) noted that in at least some studies the correlation between social class and conduct disturbance was either no longer evident, or far reduced, after controlling for measures of family discord and disorganization that were associated with social class differences.

In pursuing the line of inquiry outlined earlier, the manner in which relative levels of socioeconomic disadvantage have been assessed is critical to understanding and interpreting any findings. Although this would appear to be a straightforward issue, a consideration of prior work shows that it is anything but clear cut (Allen & Mitchell, 1998; Flouri, Tzavidis, & Kallis, 2010; McLoyd et al., 2009; Ruggles, 1992; Wilson, 1996). Instead, in studies of socioeconomic disadvantage the defining parameters are often inconsistent, not well articulated, or embrace a broad spectrum of what even the most casual observer would agree are quite different conditions (cf. Featherman, Spenner, & Tsunematsu, 1988; Proctor & Dalaker, 2003). Of particular concern in the present work are distinctions between economic forms of disadvantage and those that cooccur and are frequently combined with economic circumstances to create a single index of socioeconomic status (e.g., educational disadvantage). When combined to create single indicators of socioeconomic status the differential relationships among various forms of disadvantage and child and adolescent adaptation may be obscured. Consistent with this view, Hollingshead (1975), in revising his classic scale for the assessment of socioeconomic status levels, argued strongly for the need to attend to distinctions between occupational and educational dimensions of socioeconomic disadvantage.

Relatedly, there is also a need to address the ways in which relative levels of advantage and disadvantage are defined. One area requiring greater attention in this regard is the extent to which, within each form of disadvantage, quantitative (i.e., continuous) vs. qualitative (i.e., discrete “level”) assessments may differentially shape our understanding of the nature and magnitude of patterns of association between socioeconomic disadvantage and adjustment. In most prior work, indices of socioeconomic status typically have been represented through interval scales or continua. An implicit assumption of this approach is that there is an equivalent level of “distance” between each pair of adjacent scale points on the indices of socioeconomic status employed. As a result, qualitative and/or unequal differences in the adaptive implications among various status levels, which may be important for understanding linkages between socioeconomic disadvantage and adjustment, have largely been ignored in this work. Illustratively, on some indices of socioeconomic status the “distance” or number of scale points separating a “middle-class” background and an upper-class one is roughly equal to the distance between the former and a highly impoverished one (see, e.g., Hollingshead’s (1975) nine-point scale Occupational Status Scale). Although in some ways this may be true, in others, such as their association with increased exposure to risk-related stressors, there may be a far greater “distance” between poverty and middle class than between the upper two points of the scale.

Felner et al. (1995) conducted one of the most extensive studies both sought to attend to the above issues and that investigated all three aspects of the proposed mediated pathway simultaneously, for example, household disadvantage, proximal environmental conditions, and child and adolescent adjustment. Among youth whose families were relatively economically or socially disadvantaged, those who were from homes in which adults were employed in low-income, unskilled occupations were found to have lower levels of school performance and achievement compared to those from homes in which adults were employed in semiskilled or skilled/professional occupations. Further, youth from families in which neither parent had graduated from high school exhibited significantly poorer socioemotional and academic adjustment than did those whose parents had higher educational levels, independent of family income levels. Youth who lived in relatively more disadvantaged homes also reported more negative experiences of proximal environmental conditions relating to family and school contexts and greater exposure to stressful life events. Most critically for a perspective that an ecological–mediational perspective is important for understanding patterns of linkage between socioeconomic disadvantage and levels of adjustment were the findings that proximal environmental experiences were significant predictors of adolescent adjustment, independent of their shared variance with conditions of household disadvantage, whereas conditions of disadvantage in several instances were no longer related significantly to indices of adjustment once their association with proximal environmental conditions was taken into account.

One of the more intriguing aspects of their findings was that economic and educational forms of disadvantage had somewhat differential patterns of association with indices of adjustment and proximal environmental experiences. Youth from families where there was more ­serious ­economic hardship experienced more problematic parenting, felt less connected to school, and had greater exposure to other major stressful events—themselves repeatedly documented as relating to developmental negative outcomes (Mrazek & Haggarty, 1994; Vazsonyi, Pickering, & Bolland, 2006). But, a marker of family disadvantage that is combined with occupational status to create an aggregate indicator of socioeconomic status—parental education—had a notably different and more pervasive pattern of association with the proximal risk experiences of youth. Students from homes in which neither parent had graduated from high school experienced more “across the board” developmentally negative experiences, including higher levels of rejection from parents, less social support and emphasis on intellectual–cultural issues in their families, more negative feelings about school, and heightened levels of exposure to both major and relatively minor stressors.

These findings suggest that levels of parental education may be related to relatively greater or lesser levels of resilience among students, as well as to other developmental conditions that, even for children and youth who are not experiencing economic hardship, have been linked to resilience and/or disorder.

Collectively, the studies discussed earlier provide support for view that the effects of household disadvantage on socioemotional adaptation are mediated by the developing child’s experiences at school, in the neighborhood, and in the other primary developmental contexts that define their life space. It seems clear that at least part of the impact that conditions of social and economic disadvantage have on developmental outcomes is accounted for by the ways in which these larger, more distal conditions, shape the more proximal environmental experiences of individuals. They suggest that, as we move toward attempting to build and enhance resilience among youth in poverty, the approach must address the multiple ecologically mediated pathways linking conditions of family occupational and educational disadvantage to poorer child and adolescent adjustment.

A Transactional–Ecological Frame for Understanding and Building Resilience About Children and Youth Experiencing Poverty and Disadvantage

Given the above understandings what is now required is a broader, systemic framework for understanding and predicting the differential emergence of resilience among children and youth from households and backgrounds characterized by poverty and disadvantage, as well as for guiding actions that may be useful for making significant gains in the face of conditions of risk that are so widespread.

A Transactional–Ecological perspective is best suited for explicating pathways to disorder that are congruent with tasks of understanding and building strengths and resilient outcomes for in children and adolescents in poverty (Felner & Felner, 1989; Felner et al., 2000; Lorion, Price, & Eaton, 1989; Sameroff & Fiese, 1989; Seidman, 1987). If the impact of poverty is mediated through the conditions that define the contexts and transactions that children and youth experience, and with which they must cope, then a framework that enables us to consider both the relationships between individuals and those environments, and the ways in which those environments and their experience may interact with each other, across contexts, is required. Research on developmental psychopathology and preventive interventions suggests that the principles of “healthy or normal” development central for understanding the emergence of disorder as well as resistance to disorder and dysfunction (Felner et al., 2000; Mash & Dozois, 2003; Sroufe & Rutter, 1984). Here, the focus is on understanding normal developmental trajectories as they are shaped by the interactions between the individual and the primary contexts in which they grow, as well as understanding the ways that contextual conditions may “bend” those pathways to build competencies or increase vulnerability.

Applying this developmental view to the issue of resilience among those in poverty we can identify a critical set of tasks that must be addressed if these understandings are to be useful for guiding action. These tasks are:

  1. 1.

    Assessment of the ways in which poverty is associated with disruption in normal developmental processes and contexts.

  2. 2.

    Identification of the ways that poverty and its correlates shape and impact the nature of disruptions and distortions in developmental processes.

  3. 3.

    Design and implementation of policies and interventions whose goals are to modify and “correct” these disrupted processes until they closely approximate those that lead to healthy, resilient, developmental outcomes.

Hence, this developmentally based approach starts by identifying those processes and contextual conditions that relate to “healthy” forms of the outcomes of concern (e.g., academic success instead of academic failure) even in the face of other challenges (e.g., economic hardship). They then consider the ways in which the proximal conditions experienced by those in poverty are different from those that would be desirable. Resilience building strategies are then aimed at closing this “gap” in the desired direction. Critically when thinking about what makes for “resilience,” problematic outcomes are now seen as predictable and even “normal” results of the deviations in developmental conditions since the mechanisms and processes that lead to problematic developmental outcomes are the same as those that lead to positive ones. It is only the levels and forms of these processes that differ when problematic outcomes emerge. Thus, a guiding assumption of a developmentally based model is that any “healthy” child, youth, or adult, if exposed to the problematic developmental process of concern, is likely to show the similar problematic outcomes. Conversely, actions to attain resilient outcomes require that the disruptions in the proximal contexts of children and youth that have resulted from economic hardship be addressed.

Adopting this broad “developmental” approach is an important first step. But clearly such a broad developmental perspective does not possess sufficient specificity concerning the conditions and processes that shape “resilience” and the emergence of one specific set of outcomes over another. To attain such specificity we need greater precision and agreement in our definitions of the central concepts that mark potential points for intervention in developmental pathways to resilience or disorder. Of particular concern are the ways in which we define risk, vulnerability, resilience itself, protective conditions, and onset, as the failure to draw clear distinctions among these concepts may lead to ambiguity and confusions that hamper the systematic accumulation of a body of knowledge for guiding our understanding of “why some kids do well when they shouldn’t” or, more scientifically, for reducing the marginal probability of the emergence of disorder in the fact of serious economic hardship and disadvantage.

Understanding Developmental Pathways to Resilience: Disentangling Vulnerability, Risk, Protective Factors, and Onset of Disorder or Maintaining Positive Developmental Trajectories

As is discussed elsewhere in this volume, most perspectives on disorder or health start with a fundamental “diathesis-stress” perspective. This model holds that individuals may have either genetically based or otherwise acquired vulnerabilities to the onset of disorder. These vulnerabilities are the diathesis side of the equation. They “set” the person’s threshold of susceptibility to environmental conditions (e.g., stress; disadvantage) or hazards (e.g., high levels of contextual disorganization, restrictive opportunity structures, sharp changes in developmental demands; other forms of danger) that may precipitate the onset of disorder.

What is important to understand is that, although often misused and misapplied, the concept of risk is defined epidemiologically (Felner et al., 2000). It is “a conditional statement about the probability that any member of a given population or subpopulation will develop later disorder. Often overlooked in discussions of risk is that the designation of being a member of an ‘at risk’ group says little about any specific member of that group other than that they have been exposed to the condition(s) of risk under ­consideration. If the conditional probabilities of disorder in a population are ‘X,’ it is not that all members of that group posses ‘X’ levels of predisposition or ‘riskness’ for disorder.” …A risk designation is no more than an actuarial statement about the members of a selected group (Felner et al. ). As discussed, there is perhaps no more widespread and pervasive set of conditions of risk to which children and youth are exposed than poverty and disadvantage. Efforts to build resilience have, as one implicit, if not explicit goal, a focus on addressing the probabilistic ways in which conditions of risk (poverty and its correlates) disrupt developmental processes in the lives of all children and youth in a cohort.

What is also important to understand in this discussion is that it now makes the widespread view that children or youth in poverty are “high risk” is completely inappropriate. They have clearly been potentially exposed to relatively greater levels of conditions of risk, and they may also be seen to be a population “at risk.” But they are not “high-risk” individuals. Unfortunately, the term “risk” has been frequently applied to imply that all individuals in a “high-risk” group are somehow more fragile or vulnerable than all of those in lower risk groups. This is simply not the case. Indeed, from a resilience perspective, depending on other developmental attributes individuals may have acquired (see below) or proximal environmental conditions in their homes or schools, on an individual basis they may be far less likely—and therefore less at risk—than certain specific youth not in poverty.

This conceptual slippage stems, at least in part from the practice of individual-level variables, especially when aggregated for a population or group, being spoken about as risk markers (c.f. Catalano, Haggerty, Hawkins, & Elgin, 2011; Hawkins, Catalano, & Miller, 1992; Mrazek & Haggarty, 1994). For example, children who are shy, who show signs of behavioral problems in the classroom, or who have reading/learning problems are often designated “at risk.” So, as a first step to differentiating among critical ­elements of pathways to resilience for children/youth in poverty it is important to avoid this terminology creep and be clear that actuarial statements cannot be made about particular individuals.

As we move to understanding risk for those exposed to poverty and disadvantage there are several corollaries of our definition of risk that are important. First, conditions of risk are primarily environmental in nature—disadvantage and poverty, as well as proximal disruptions in developmental contexts clearly fall into this category. This is not to say that being part of a population group that may have some genetic risk characteristics would also qualify, so long as we remember we are talking about a population-level attribute.

Second, and critically for understanding the nature and emergence of resilience for children and youth in poverty—such environmental conditions can have two quite distinct roles—as predisposing conditions and as precipitating/compensatory conditions. When environmental conditions act in a predisposing (or risk enhancing) fashion, vulnerabilities, which in our definition are always person-level variables, are acquired. This acquisition may result either from problematic interactions with environmental conditions that are present or the lack of exposure to important developmentally promoting conditions and resources. For example, poor early parent–child interactions may lead to the development of vulnerabilities and delays in a number of areas of child functioning.

Strengths and personal competencies may also be acquired from positive, more proximal and primary developmental contexts and are again person-level variables. In keeping with the mediational model discussed earlier, one way of enhancing resilience then is by supporting or enhancing the ability of proximal conditions (family patterns, opportunity-to-learn conditions in schools) to withstand the frequent negative impacts that may result from a lack of economic resources and the stresses or paucity of resources that may accompany such economic hardships. Failure to accurately understand that these person-level characteristics are, in fact, “first-order” developmental outcomes (i.e., acquired vulnerabilities and competencies/strengths) has, in the past, led to their being incorrectly labeled as ­individual-level risk conditions or as early signs of “onset” of specific disorders.

The levels of acquired competencies, strengths, and vulnerabilities all influence the probability that an individual will be resilient in the face of the experience of the more problematic contextual or conditions of risk that frequently defines the developmental conditions that surround children and youth whose families lack in economic resources. But, as we have seen, they are not markers of individual risk nor are they typically direct and inevitable markers of the onset of disorder. We must pause here to also note that to talk about building resiliencies in individuals also muddies these concepts. Resilience, in a population level framework, is an outcome, defined by a person or population’s response to challenge and stress. Discussions of building “resiliencies” lose this essential defining element and obscure important differences between such outcomes and aspects of developmental pathways that produce them. What is “built” or acquired are strengths, vulnerabilities are acquired or avoided, and environmental resources and stressors interact with those in very specific ways so that even should a vulnerability be acquired, without exposure to triggering conditions, no difficulties may emerge. In this instance, resilience simply results from the child avoiding exposure to certain ­developmental demands, even though heightened vulnerability levels have been acquired. Indeed, put this way, primary development contexts that are resistant to being disrupted by poverty may themselves be resilient, that is, have or maintain positive developmental functioning in the face of serious risk and challenge.

Let us explore these issues a bit further. Environmental circumstances are now seen as potentially acting as precipitating or protective conditions, rather than simply predisposing ones. They can interact with existing, previously acquired, vulnerabilities and competencies to trigger the onset of more serious dysfunction. Similarly, protective conditions in proximal environments and developmental contexts may act in a compensatory fashion, reducing the likelihood that existing vulnerabilities will be “activated” when the child experiences conditions of risk.

Implicit in this view of unfolding pathways to disorder is that exposure to conditions of risk or the acquisition of vulnerabilities does not inevitably lead to the onset of disorder (see Fig. 7.1). Neither does exposure to protective factors nor the acquisition of competencies always result in health and resilience. Rather, these are the sequential, dynamically interactive elements of developmental trajectories to dysfunction and well-being (Felner et al., 2000). And it is these elements of the developmental trajectory that are the appropriate direct targets for change for efforts that seek to enhance resilience and prevent disorder. Framed this way, resilience enhancement efforts for children and youth whose lives are characterized by poverty and disadvantage should include focused strategies that (1) seek to reduce levels of conditions of risk or increase levels of protective factors; (2) directly, or indirectly through the previous step, reduce the incidence rates of person-level vulnerabilities or the enhancement of personal competencies and strengths; and (3) alter levels of conditions of risk and of protective factors that have been shown to interact with acquired vulnerabilities and strengths to trigger the onset of more serious disorder or to produce resilience in the face of serious challenge.

Fig. 7.1
figure 1

Felner risk/protective factors acquired vulnerability/strength and competencies resilience/disorder

Full size image

This conceptualization of developmental pathways has direct implications for the evaluation of resilience-focused initiatives. The initial assessments of the efficacy of such efforts may take place far sooner than is often thought to be possible. Illustratively, for some efforts that seek to enhance the resilience of children as the move through life it may be a number of years before the primary conditions and disorders we seek to impact are likely to develop. A perspective based on the above understandings of developmental pathways makes it far more possible to obtain relatively rapid assessments of the degree to which the program or policies, and their effects are “on course” and are likely to have the desired long-term effects. This can be done by assessing the degree to which the initiative has produced changes in the desired directions in key conditions that are earlier in the developmental pathway, even when they are far distant from the time when we might expect the onset of dysfunction. They also help us to better understand the levels of change and program required to obtain the desired effects.

For example, our first assessments of program impact would focus on the degree to which levels of risk have been reduced and levels of enhancing conditions increased. Next, we would assess the degree to which the incidence and prevalence of vulnerabilities and competencies in the population have been changed. Finally, as population members experience identifiable conditions that have been shown to have a high likelihood to act as precipitants (e.g., school transitions; being approached by gangs) and/or moves through developmental periods when maximum onsets are expected, we would examine differential rates of the occurrence of adaptive difficulties in order to assess the levels of resilience obtained. But, it is also the case that when we have clearly identified increased levels of strengths/reductions of vulnerabilities (e.g., marked increases in the reading skills and levels of children in poverty and reductions in “equity gaps”) we would have clear evidence for the probability of having enhanced resilience in the population group (those in poverty) across the life span.

Mediating Conditions

Let us now revisit the issue of mediating conditions and mediated pathways as they fit within the current framework, so that we may link this perspective back to the initial studies we presented. Mediating conditions can now be seen to be a subset of the conditions of risk we have discussed earlier. They are those proximal ­circumstances in the child’s developmental ­contexts that most directly shape daily experiences. For example, when children experience “poverty” it is, as we have seen, the associated changes in the conditions of the child’s life that are actually responsible for the impacts that have been observed. For example, within families, poverty and economic scarcity are often associated with negative changes in parenting patterns, parental depression, and intra-parental conflict—conditions that have, themselves, been found to be frequently associated with multiple, comorbid, and complex patterns of developmental difficulties. From this perspective, poverty, ­disadvantage, and their correlates are seen as markers of the potentially higher levels of these more proximal changes and mediating conditions in the person’s developmental context (Evans, Eckenrode, & Marcynszyn, 2010; Felner et al., 1983). In the model we have proposed in the current chapter, the direct focus of resilience building interventions would be on reducing the levels of these negative mediators (conditions of risk) as experienced by the entire population.

Implications for the Nature and Targeting of Resilience Enhancement-Focused Programming and Policies

Let us now consider the implications of the above framework to the targeting and appropriate shape of programmatic efforts that seek to enhance resilience among those children and youth who live in poverty. The first implications are that an approach that is based on individual screenings is neither advisable nor required to as we seek to identify appropriate target populations for resilience enhancing efforts. Instead, we can employ epidemiological data to focus accurately on entire populations whose members have a high probability of both experiencing the critical mediators and for identifying the specific vulnerabilities and strengths that may be the appropriate first-order outcomes on which the programmatic efforts should focus to enhance resilience in that population.

To this point we have built an argument that, as Lamb (1992) has noted, poverty is an ­economic and not a psychological variable. Its implication for developmental outcomes lies in its association with the ways these economic conditions relate to altered societal, community, material, and psychological conditions of risk that mediates or translate the economic conditions to direct daily experiences (Felner, 1992, 2000). Based on epidemiological data we can predict, with a high degree of certainty that children in economically distressed neighborhoods (here the neighborhood variable further defines the nature of the poverty and disadvantage with which the efforts will be concerned) will be exposed to substandard schooling, high levels of environmental stresses, a paucity of local conditions that lead to high expectations and aspirations, and literally dozens of other negative mediators (Mrug & Windle, 2009; Wilson, 1987).

Efforts that address these and other risk or developmentally promoting conditions, for all children living in such neighborhoods, will be far more cost effective and efficient in reaching our target group than would screening-based efforts that seek to target only some children and families (Felner, 1992, 2000; Felner et al., 2000). Illustratively, to screen all of the children in just one public housing community in a city like Chicago for the presence of conditions that may mediate the development of problem social and emotional outcomes would be incredibly costly. It would almost certainly require all of the funds that are available for conducting the intervention. Instead, interventions that target mediators that have a high probability of being of concern for the entire population would be far more cost effective and reduce the marginal probabilities of disorder across the population group while building important strengths that further facilitate the ability to deal with the range of challenges that stem from economic and neighborhood disadvantage. For example, the intervention might be provided to all children and families strong preschool programs, high quality educational environments, efforts to enhance the safety of the neighborhoods, and/or the modification removal of policies that create disincentives for family success, or that create barriers to access to quality employment opportunities. Put otherwise, more 2 decades ago, Zigler (1990) succinctly summarized the prospects and problems of early intervention programs and underscored the importance of efforts that target entire contexts by noting, “No amount of counseling, early childhood curricula, or home visits will ever take the place of jobs that provide decent incomes, affordable housing, appropriate health care, optimal family configurations, or integrated neighborhoods where children encounter positive role models” (p. xiii). For example, the New Hope intervention program which provided wage supplements, work supports, and child-care and health insurance subsidies to a low income working adults has been shown to affect children directly, boys in particular in this case, by increasing parents sense of control and confidence in their ability to protect their children, and by reducing their stress levels and use of discipline (Epps & Hutson, 2007).

Summary

In the model we have proposed thus far, the first-order, direct, or “immediate” targets of change in resilience enhancement efforts will typically be nonindividual level elements of developmental trajectories to adaptation and disorder. Strategies will focus on direct efforts to increase or decrease, as appropriate, the levels of conditions of risk, protective factors, and developmentally enhancing experiences to which a population is exposed. Changes in levels of these first-order elements of the developmental pathways of populations will, in turn, radiate to impact the degree to which second-order changes are accomplished. These second-order elements of developmental pathways should show changes, in desired directions, relatively soon after attainment of the first-order changes. These “early intermediate outcomes” provide preliminary evidence that the strategy is on course for being effective in achieving its long-term goals. Second-order targets of change in developmental pathways include levels of acquired vulnerabilities as well as strengths and competencies that may be required to attain resilient outcomes. Interventions will thus involve systematic actions aimed at modifying the reciprocal and interactive influences of conditions of risk, strengths, vulnerabilities, and resources, in shaping trajectories to the developmental outcomes of concern (c.f. Fig. 7.1).

Given these understandings about those aspects of developmental pathways that are the direct and indirect, intermediate, targets of change, we turn to the question of “what are the appropriate long-term goals of resilience building interventions?” The answer we select for this question is critical as it defines those specific conditions earlier in developmental pathways with which we will be concerned. It is to these concerns that we now turn.

Targeting Resilience Enhancing Efforts for Children and Youth in Poverty: Issues of Outcome Specificity and Pathways to Disorder Outcome Specificity

Elsewhere in this volume several authors raise the questions and issues of the appropriate level of the specificity of the “targeting” of developmental difficulties. Some of the approaches in those chapters have focused on broad approaches to the enhancement of resilience, while others have discussed more focused concerns, such as issues of resilience as they relate to delinquency, depression, self-control, and learning disabilities. In considering the question of what are the appropriate goals of resilience efforts for children and youth in poverty, we now turn to the issue of whether programmatic efforts should have as their goal(s) the reduction of highly specific disorders or whether, at least when the issue of poverty serves as the focal condition of risk, our efforts should be focused on broad-based and multiple outcomes.

Historically, a major dimension on which most efforts to enhance resilience and resistance to risk, or prevent disorder, reflects two quite different assumptions about the specificity and uniqueness of developmental pathways. Single outcome focused programs, such as those targeted to ­substance abuse, delinquency, school failure, depression, teen suicide, and teen pregnancy reflect a specific disease/disorder pathway model that rests heavily on classic medical paradigms of disorder. These paradigms hold that dysfunction is caused by specifiable deficits, disease agents, or predispositions that interact with individual vulnerabilities that can also be specified.

A contrasting perspective to this position is one that holds that there is a need for a comprehensive, multicausal and nonspecific developmental pathways/root causes focused approach (c.f. Felner & Felner, 1989; Mrazek & Haggarty, 1994). This model recognizes that (1) most of the disorders we seek to prevent have a large number of common risk factors; (2) that conditions that protect against one disorder generally also protect against many others; and (3) that there are nonspecific personal vulnerabilities that increase a person’s susceptibility to the onset of a wide array of dysfunction. The pathways to most of the social, emotional, and adaptive difficulties with which we are concerned are generally complex and shared by more than one disorder. Hence, for a wide range of developmental outcomes and sociopathologies it appears that efforts to identify specific and unique etiological “causal” agents are not appropriate.

For children and youth in poverty, given the wide array of different elements of the developmental pathway that poverty may impact, and that the condition of risk here is entirely outside the control of individual, comprehensive, broadly targeted approaches are clearly the most appropriate. Further, recent research from a number of converging research traditions shows the potential efficacy of such an approach to a population that has heightened probability of the onset of a broad array of disorder and dysfunction, that is so large, and that has such a broad set of potential disruptions in the proximal, mediating contexts that define the developmental experiences of the focal population. Studies of the adaptive impact of a wide array of developmental circumstances have shown that there are common developmental antecedents, such as family resources and interaction patterns, economic and social deprivation, other life stresses, powerlessness, and an array of nonspecific protective resiliency factors (e.g., social support, sense of self-efficacy, hope) that all relate to the probability that persons in a population will develop an extraordinary assortment of mental and physical disorders (Allen & Mitchell, 1998; Mrazek & Haggarty, 1994; O’Connell, Boat, & Warner, 2009; Sameroff & Fiese, 1989; Silverman, 1989). Converging with this developmental evidence, the data on the epidemiology of serious disorders (Allen & Mitchell, 1998; Mrazek & Haggarty, 1994; O’Connell et al., 2009) have also pointed to the high levels of comorbidity among these more severe instances and further underscored the fact that they appear to share a common constellation of antecedent developmental experiences and root causes in their emergent pathways.

The nonlinear and overlapping nature of pathways to disorder, particularly among those who may be exposed to a wide array of developmental circumstances that are problematic such as those in poverty, is further underscored by a third set of studies on the stability of the developmental course of such difficulties (Cantwell & Baker, 1989). Summarizing the early findings pertaining to high levels of comorbidity of disorder, Rutter (1989) concluded, “Perhaps the most striking finding to emerge from all developmental epidemiological studies … has been the extremely high levels of comorbidity” (p.645). These findings have only been reinforced in subsequent years, including major studies by such groups as the Institute of Medicine (Mrazek & Haggarty, 1994; O’Connell et al., 2009). Similarly, in discussing commonalities across root causes and the need to consider broadly focused prevention approaches rather than that focus on specific outcomes, Sameroff and Fiese (1989) state that, “Whereas clear linkages have been found between some ‘germs’ and specific biological disorders, this has not been true for behavioral disorders….” (p.24). Less technically, but more succinctly, Lisbeth Schorr (1988) has, as noted, summarized the interconnectedness among social problems by noting that “Rotten outcomes cluster,” and that children from high-risk environments [such as severe, pervasive, and/or dense poverty neighborhoods] encounter developmental experiences that are so severe as to increase the rates of morbidity they will develop across the full spectrum of human social, emotional, and health problems.

To this point we have emphasized in our ­discussions sets of interrelated but still discreet issues and understandings that need to be woven together for a more complete conceptual framework to guide the enhancement of resilience in the face of the multiple risks and challenge confronted by children and you in poverty. We now turn to a brief discussion of the application to this task of an integrative theoretical framework that we have proposed for this purpose (Felner et al., 2000) that allows us to accomplish this weaving. It is to a presentation of that framework we turn next.

Transactional–Ecological Models for Prevention

The Transactional–Ecological model is a framework that Felner and his colleagues (Felner et al., 2001; Felner & Felner, 1989; Felner, Silverman, & Adan, 1992; Felner, Silverman, & Adix, 1991) have both refined and demonstrated its utility for guiding interventions and policy, over the past several decades, particularly as it applies to prevention, promotion, and resilience enhancement. Other authors have also made important contributions to the model (c.f., Seidman, 1987, 1990). Felner (2000) has argued that the framework contains critical features for guiding strategies that have the necessary levels of comprehensiveness to address the range of issues raised earlier, while also providing for the degree of specificity required for interventions that meet the test of intentionality (Cowen, 2000).

This Transactional–Ecological (T–E) model obtains from a conceptual synthesis of two other highly complementary frameworks, the transactional (c.f. Sameroff & Fiese, 1989) and ecological (c.f. Bronfennbrenner, 1979) models of development. Full discussion of each of these approaches is beyond the parameters of this chapter. But let us attempt to capture the key features of each for the issues of concern here.

The Transactional Model has been articulated by Sameroff and Chandler (1975) and Sameroff and Fiese (1989) as a guide for efforts to enhance the developmental outcomes of children and youth preventive efforts. The model emphasizes the dynamic, reciprocal inter­actions between the individual and their context, with bidirectional influence being a fundamental ­element (Sarason & Doris, 1979). For example, the interactions between an infant and their parent, or between a youth and her peers, are thought to be a result of the child’s influence on the parent or group, and the reciprocal effect of the environmental influence on the child.

A transactional perspective has, as its focal targets for change, key developmental processes that lead to strengths or disorder. But it is not sufficient for addressing the full range of conditions that must be considered by interventions when the concern is the developmental course of children and youth living in poverty. The transactional model is still, at best, dyadic. It can only deal with those proximal environments in which the person directly participates—and many of the contexts that impact the life of children in poverty, and others, extend well beyond their direct experience. Further, since the transactional model always views the sources of influence as bidirectional (Sarason & Doris, 1979), there are some proximal contexts on which individual behavior has little influence (e.g., schools) for which it is not well suited for providing directions for intervention. To address these limitations and provide for a comprehensive model of prevention, the author of this chapter and his colleagues as well as others (Felner et al., 1992, 2000, 2001; Felner & Felner, 1989; Seidman, 1987, 1990) have advocated for the joining of an ecological model of development (Barker, 1968; Bronfennbrenner, 1979; Lewin, 1951) to the transactional one.

Combining the ecological and transactional perspectives to create a Transactional–Ecological (T–E) model broadens the focus of each in important ways. Consistent with transactional perspectives, an ecological view holds that developmental trajectories are shaped by, “Progressive, mutual accommodation between an active, growing human being and the changing properties of the settings in which the developing person lives” (Bronfennbrenner, 1979, p.21). The ecological framework also provides for the consideration of additional elements of human contexts. It offers a comprehensive and integrative means of viewing the interactions between the various parts of total ecological and psychological systems, not just between individuals and their proximal environments. In particular, this perspective allows for the consideration of influences that shape the dynamic relationships between systems and the ways in which being part of these multiple systems influence human development. Given the breadth of the impact of poverty, typically both on all or most of the systems in which the child may participate directly and on those in which their parents/primary caregivers function, a perspective that considers the reciprocal influences of proximal systems across both the individuals who inhabit them and on each other is critical to fully appreciating the challenges and outcomes that are confronted by youth in poverty and in these systems.

There are at least three important ways in which the synthesis of ecological and transactional models enables us to address these concerns. First, it enables us to consider the etiological significance of conditions with which the child comes into direct contact, but on which their behavior does not have a significant bidirectional influence. Included in this category of conditions are such “social structural conditions” as the density and distribution of poverty and social disadvantage (Iceland, 2006; Jencks & Perterson, 1991; Schorr, 1988; Wilson, 1987), shifting economic conditions that influence both the prognosis of poverty and motivation (Halperin, 1998; Judy & D’Amico, 1997; W.T. Grant Foundation, 1988) and the regularities or structures of such primary developmental contexts as schools (Sarason, 1982, 1996).

Of particular interest for the current chapter is that this level allows us to consider those systemwide conditions that distort, in pathogenic ways, all of the dyadic transactions that take place within their reach. Clearly poverty, particularly when dense and persistent, is one of those ­systemwide conditions with such pervasive impact. These conditions may occur at several different system levels. The smallest system level of this type is what have been termed microsystems (Bronfennbrenner, 1979) or immediate settings-level contexts. These systems are the primary developmental contexts in which people live. They include such contexts as schools, religious congregations, the family, the worksite, and peer groups. The regularities of these settings may be only influenced slowly, if at all, by the dyadic interactions that take place within them. For example, the overwhelming flux and disorganization that accompanies the transition to a high school “fed” by multiple middle schools is a condition that may seriously disrupt many of the dyadic patterns that are taking place within the school and peer groups (De Wit, Karioja, & Rye, 2010; Felner & Adan, 1988; Felner, Ginter, & Primavera, 1982). Similarly, the social regularities of a school or workplace, its resource patterns, and other formal system regularities may go far to shape the nature of the interpersonal interactions that take place within it (Sarason, 1982, 1996). But, in neither case will the dyadic interactions rapidly nor necessarily impact the system regularities that are shaping them.

At the level of macrosystems (i.e., social structural conditions and regularities) (Bronfennbrenner, 1979), the individual’s behavior often has little effect. But, with more proximal settings (microsystems), these conditions have significant adaptive implications for individual behavior, both directly and through their impact on the other system relationships that a person experiences. For example, when considering the definition of a resilient outcome for those in poverty it is important to understand that shifts in macrosystemic conditions have both “raised the bar” both about what is expected, and shifted the value of what was, in the past, a motivating goal with clear rewards associated with it. Illustratively, due to societal changes the earning potential of a high school graduate has dropped more than 40% in the decades between 1970 and 1990 and has continued to decline (Halperin, 1998; Judy & D’Amico, 1997; National Academy of Science, 2010; W.T. Grant Foundation, 1988). This is a structural ­condition over which the individual has little ­control. But this shift may have profound effects both on the nature of those behaviors students view as adaptive. When this condition is coupled, for example, with others that indicate to youth that they have little hope for attending college—even if they complete high school—this fundamental shift in the economic meaning of graduation may make alternative, societally undesirable behaviors, such as early school leaving, early parenthood, and/or involvement in illicit activities to earn money, appear to be intelligent and attractive choices.

A second enhancement for efforts to understand and promote resilience in children and adolescents that derives from joining ecological views to transactional ones is that this synthesis allows for consideration of the ways in which interactions between individuals and any specific setting are influenced by differences and similarities between that setting and others that make up their life context (i.e., it allows for consideration of cross-contextual effects). Such relationships between microsystems have been labeled mesosystems (Bronfennbrenner, 1979). The need to consider transcontextual influences rests on the understanding that persons have a number of primary settings which comprise the ecological map of their life context. Each of these settings has unique demands that shape the nature of the transactions required by them. The solutions, skills, and abilities required by one context may, when applied in other settings, be complimentary, antagonistic, and/or irrelevant. Illustratively, for students in poverty, the skills and interaction styles required to be adaptive in an inner-city environment where safety may be an issue, when applied to a school setting, be maladaptive or irrelevant. Such conditions may result in children from inner-city environments being mislabeled as lacking in social competence or other abilities when, in fact, the actual problem is not that these children are deficient; rather, there is a poor match in the skills required among the different developmental contexts that make up their lives. For children and adolescents, who often have little ability to impact or select the primary settings that define their lives, understanding the dynamics among those settings as they act reciprocally to shape both adaptation of individuals and each other is perhaps even more important than it is for adults, who may at least more easily “opt out” of settings that are poor matches for the other in their lives.

These mesosystemic relationships also add to our understanding of pathways to resilience and efforts to enhance it. They bring attention to conditions that surround resilience promoting efforts that may play a limiting role in the impact of such efforts and, if not adequately considered, may lead to false conclusions that a program effort, or the building of a particular set of skills that is relevant to resilience is ineffective when, in fact, it is a necessary but not a sufficient element of a more complete resilience development strategy.

There are a number of instances where this may occur. Illustratively, the impact of a resilience-focused emotional and social/behavioral problem-solving skill building curriculum will certainly be attenuated if the school context in which it takes place does not also provide adequate academic experiences to enable the students to develop necessary skills in these critical academic areas. Even with the best decision-making skills, and the motivation to make prosocial decisions, outcomes will be limited if the student is unable to read. Likewise, parent training programs for parents who have few economic resources may enable parents to gain important knowledge and skills, but, the degree to which they apply this new knowledge in their interactions with children may be influenced by conditions in other systems in their lives. If they are experiencing severe stress from economic hardship, or concerned over the adequacy and safety of the school, they may not be as likely to use those new skills at the requisite levels of quality and intensity. As the most highly trained developmental psychologists can tell you, when it has been a “bad day” outside the home, the quality of their parenting may be sharply diminished. Such “bad days” are, unfortunately, the stark day-to-day reality for parents with few economic resources, those in negative job surroundings, those in poverty, and other groups with chronic stressors. These conditions will all certainly reduce the degree to which newly acquired parenting skills are translated to action. Thus, an ecological analysis of the interrelated systems of the lives of those we seek to impact is critical for ensuring that change efforts are adequately comprehensive and that research on them does not lead to the incorrect conclusion that intervention elements which may be necessary, but not sufficient, do not have utility for the building of resilience.

Third, a comprehensive model for understanding the adaptation and resilience of children and youth must provide for consideration of the impact of settings on individuals with which they do not come into direct contact. Again, this is particularly important for children and youth who caregivers, throughout the day, are often parts of systems in which the child does not participate at all but which may shape the transactions of those caregivers with the child (e.g., parental workplaces; social welfare offices; teacher unions). Bronfenbrenner (1979) has referred to these as exosystems. Illustratively, a child may never have direct contact with the neighborhoods and conditions in which their parents or grandparents were raised, or with the workplaces of their parents. But traumas suffered in these earlier developmental contexts (Garbarino, 1990), values learned in them (Sarason, 1982), or conditions within the workplaces must all be part of a broader analysis of influences that contribute to the nature of the parent–child interactions that occur. And, of course, for those in children living in poverty, the likelihood that those caring for them are experiencing stressful or even problematic interactions elsewhere in the settings that define their lives is clearly elevated (e.g., high stress levels; high levels of job instability and underemployment; difficult, exhausting work). These setting level regularities would then be directly targeted by introducing systemwide conditions (e.g., on-site, child care centers that promote parent involvement; linking parents to appropriate employment opportunities) that reduce workers’ stresses and enhance well-being and family support resources—thereby enhancing the resilience of children and youth in poverty without ever directly engaging them. These changes would also be expected to radiate to the family/microsystem level interactions of all workers in the setting for enhancing the probability or the acquisition of important strengths and reducing the acquisition of vulnerabilities that may have resulted in the case of more problematic family functioning.

To briefly summarize, joining an ecological perspective to a transactional one to create a T–E model expands our focus to include the ways in which person-setting interactions are impacted by relationships between settings, as well as the broader, macrosystemic contexts in which they may be nested. Equal weight is given to understanding dyadic transactions and to the analysis of the impact of and interactions among various settings, mesosystems, and macrosystems that may significantly influence developmental pathways.

There is an important corollary of the above features of the T–E model that makes it particularly useful for providing a more fully contextualized definition of resilience than might otherwise be developed. That is, the T–E model affords us the ability to view the definition of resilience as one that must be considered, and often can only be understood, in context. Some behaviors and outcomes that we would seek to reduce or promote do not require the assumption that there are deficits or defect in the persons/population targeted—a core factor in victim blaming and disorder-focused approaches to interventions. The T–E framework allows us to consider the ways in which the target “disorders” may, in fact, be adaptive solutions to contextual conditions that are disordered or at least incongruent with broader societal expectations and demand. Hence, an important understanding here is that acquired strengths that might enable a child to be resilient in a dysfunctional or problematic context—for example, where peer values and rewards may be at odds with those of the broader society requirements—may well be, in those other contexts (those same strengths are) vulnerabilities that lead to a lack of resilience. By utilizing the lens of a T–E perspective, many of the target conditions with which we are concerned can be seen to be the result of highly appropriate and adaptive efforts in disordered or alternative contexts. That is, “what might appear to be deviant outcomes may be those that any healthy child would exhibit in the environments and systems that define their lives … what might have been seen as disorder or disease may be ­better understood as a result of the child’s appropriate, predictable, and highly adaptive attempts to adjust to contexts and conditions that require responses which are incompatible with those in other contexts in which they live.” That is, … what might have been seen as a disorder or disease may be better understood as the child’s appropriate, predictable, and highly adaptive attempts to adjust to contexts and conditions [that are developmentally inappropriate or disordered] (Felner & Felner, 1989, p. 21).

Applying this view to understanding and defining resilience and children’s efforts to adapt in the contexts of poverty, the first, fundamental questions that must be asked are: “In what ways were the conditions and adaptive patterns (e.g., behavior, belief system, etc.) that we wish to modify adaptive at the time they developed?” and, “Are there factors that are associated with poverty or its correlates in the contexts of the child’s life that make the interaction patterns, or the lack of them, continue to be adaptive?” A basic assumption of this model is that any adaptive pattern—however problematic—originated as an attempt to positively adapt to conditions that existed at the time. Given this assumption, efforts to understand or change any developmental pathway or outcome cannot take place independent of a consideration of the full set of historical, familial, economic, social, and political contexts that provide meaning to a person’s life experiences. And, as is clear, for children and youth in poverty, particularly when coupled with racial or ethnic disadvantage, such consideration in the understanding of resilience and its enhancement are essential. Such an approach will allow us to see that many of the behaviors or interaction patterns we may have viewed as “not resilient” actually reflect high levels of resilience as they were simply intelligent, effective attempts at adaptive solutions to disordered contexts.

Illustratively, in the case of families in poverty, until recently social welfare policies often punished recipients for earning income, acquiring savings, and attempting to accumulate equity (Moynihan, 1986). These conditions may have led welfare recipients to behave in ways that society viewed as inappropriate (e.g., not saving; not seeking employment). Instead, the recipients were actually showing intelligent and adaptive problem solutions in the face of disordered contextual demands. To avoid the confusion that places the locus of such difficulties inside the person, particularly when dealing with individuals in communities where dense poverty and a lack of positive employment opportunities are pervasive, we might better refer to these and other positive adaptations to disordered contexts—that are dysfunctional in later or other developmental settings—as “socio”pathology rather than psychopathology, with the latter’s inherent individual focus. This view further sharpens our focus on the characteristics of contexts that systematically distort normal developmental pathways to produce what appears to be a deviant outcome—but which are, in fact, better understood as positive, resilient, and often highly adaptive efforts to dysfunctional contexts when considered in their full ecological–developmental context.

Creating Resilience Enhancing Contexts

As should be clear from our discussion, broad-based, population-level programs are those that hold the most promise for being adequate to the challenge of addressing the levels of need and the forms of adaptive challenges confronted by children and youth in poverty. It is also the case that such resilience developing approaches may be well served by shifting their attention to, or at least making certain to include in their design, strategies and programmatic elements that impact the contexts in which children and youth in poverty grow, even if those contexts never directly engage the children. Indeed, a failure to attend to modifying these contexts, in ways that “naturally” build strengths and help youth avoid the acquisition of vulnerabilities, may limit the efficacy of any efforts that focus more directly on skill building or other individual-level enhancement approaches.

The most promising of these initiatives are those that seek to understand the ways in which elements of the school, community, peer, or home environment may be structured or reorganized to improve their match to the developmental needs and competencies of the populations that inhabit them, as well as to increase the degree of congruence in the developmental demands and expectations across the multiple settings inhabited by children in poverty. Such approaches promise to build resilience in a comprehensive and highly impactful way and to more full reflect the recommendations of the Institute of Medicine that state, “… The ultimate goal to achieve optimal prevention should be to build the principles of prevention into the ordinary activities of everyday life and into community structures to enhance development over the entire life span.” Marazk & Haggarty, IOM, pp.298–299, p.323.

To correct this overly narrow view of resilience and its development, particularly if we are to deal with the enormity of the task of dealing with the epidemic levels of disorder and failure associated with poverty, what must be recognized is that legitimate efforts will include a focus on changes in social and educational policies and programming that increases the developmental appropriateness and resources, and reduce the conditions of risk, in all significant human contexts. School and welfare reform and transformation efforts; restructuring of work sites to increase worker participation, satisfaction, access, and productivity; community development efforts to change opportunity structures, safety, sense of community, and resource patterns for families; and family support programs, including and social and recreational “youth development programming” (Carnegie Council on Adolescent Development, 1989; Shinn & Yoshikawa, 2008) are but a few of the domains of initiatives that seek to change the ecology of the peoples’ lives and that have, in the past, not been adequately recognized for their potential as core strategies in resilience development.

There are numerous other such efforts that may be targeted to children and families that are more ecologically congruent with the existing regularities and systems of their lives than those of the earlier generations of such efforts. For families in poverty and economically disadvantaged neighborhoods and communities, comprehensive efforts that target changes throughout the context are not only advisable but necessary for almost any more individually focused efforts to be viable. Parents who are concerned about their children cannot and will not go to work or to obtain additional education if it means leaving their children without adequate adult supervision and support in high-risk neighborhoods. Hence, although clearly not typically thought of as enhancing resilience, initiatives that provide child care may act to do so both directly, through their impact on the children who participate, but also indirectly, through the profound effects that such access may have on the lives of the parents of children in poverty. Indeed, it is important to understand that social programs and polices that require parents to go to work or pursue training without providing for high-quality child care are, in fact, asking parents to engage in what may well be chargeable neglect. These are precisely the kinds of problematic policies that may emerge without sufficient attention to the way in which what appear to be dysfunctional behaviors are, in fact, found to be adaptive ones when contextual regularities are considered. Indeed, given the changing nature of society quality child care and afterschool programming that provides both supervision as well as social and educational development aspects may be one of the most powerful setting-level interventions that may be mounted, for all families, under the “flag” of resilience enhancement and the promotion of positive outcomes. Additional family-support programs, such as those that provide homeless families and/or those who are socially and educationally disadvantaged with coordinated and necessary residential stabilization, medical, human service, and food resources also fall into this category.

Concluding Comments

We have presented what we see as a framework that can guide the development of the next generation of efforts to enhance the live outcomes of children and youth in poverty. As such efforts move toward their next generation of efforts, the contributions of those who provide the shoulders on which we stand in gaining our current vision should not be underestimated or underappreciated. Given this perspective and their “boost,” we hope that the perspective provided in this chapter further changes our ways of “think about what we are thinking about” in the continued evolution of approaches that seek to ensure that all children have the developmental experiences and circumstances that allow them to grow to fully empowered adults, with all of the choices and opportunities that enable them to live satisfying and successful lives.