Resilience is a buzz-word in the child development arena, and being able to apply the evidence about how it works has become the holy grail of innumerable prevention and early intervention efforts.

A search of the open-access library of academic references, PSYCinfo, will turn up over 4,500 entries related to the concept, several times the number that would have been found even a few years ago. With interest in and use of the term at an all-time high, you would be forgiven for thinking we must be close to mastering the concept in a children’s services context. Alas, far from it.

The eminent UK child psychiatrist Michael Rutter defines resilience broadly as doing well in the face of adversity (see below). Most experts on the subject agree that this is the best working definition we have. But it is not enough to help us make children more resilient.

There are two major obstacles. Although most agree on a definition, it is a different matter when it comes to using it in practice in relation to the outcomes wanted for children or the factors targeted in prevention programs.

Consequently, in different parts of the world research is trying to figure out if resilience is something intrinsic or extrinsic to a child, or something in between; if it develops and changes over time or is somehow a static quality. Is resilience perhaps context-dependent? Or culturally specific? Does it even exist at all in any quantifiable sense?

It comes down to saying that children’s services practitioners should err on the side of caution when referring to resilience, and heed what is actually known about how risk and protective factors interact to produce tangible outcomes.

For example, we know that, for some children, overcrowding in the home can lead to parental depression which affects the ability of a parent to parent effectively. The combination can lead to anti-social behavior in children. That is not to say that all children who experience those risk factors will end up anti-social, but some will.

We can work with this evidence and start to think about specific and targeted ways of breaking that chain for children experiencing those risks. But it would be difficult to know how to foster ‘resiliency’ for a child experiencing those risks until we have much better understanding of what being resilient means.

Prevention activities should be looking to the evidence for proven chains of effects or so-called risk and prevention models as the logical basis for providing most if not all of the services for the populations they serve.

If it can be pinned down, the real strength of resilience will lie in its ability to explain why not all children experiencing a multitude of risks succumb to negative outcomes in the various associated chains. It will explain why a child who lives in an overcrowded home with a parent who is depressed and unable to parent effectively is not antisocial.