Early Childhood Development: Resilience and How to Foster It

Resilience is the capacity and the reality of overcoming adversity and producing positive outcomes in spite of risk factors that increase the probability of a poor outcome, and is built over time. Early relationships are critical to building resilience, as well as the capabilities that result from those supportive relationships and the features that people need to cope with adversity and overcome it. This video profiles executive function, or the ability to focus your attention, set goals, make plans, monitor how things are going, make decisions and solve problems, and have a sense of control over your life. These skills are located in the pre-frontal cortex of the brain and are built over time, require help from adults to learn, and don’t mature until age 25-30 years. The challenge in the early childhood world is that we need adults who have those capabilities to build those skills in children; if we missed developing executive function in childhood, it can be developed in this later period, but it is intensive and expensive.

This video is licensed under the CC BY-NC-SA license.