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Understanding Children and Young People’s Mental Health
The relationship between resilience and stress
Resilience helps individuals that are under stress to cope.
Key Fact
The National Scientific Centre on the Developing Child (Harvard
University) has described the role of resilience in 2015 as:
‘...converting ‘toxic stress’ into ‘tolerable stress’ by supporting
young people to achieve favourable outcomes.’
Source: National Scientific Centre on the Developing Child, 2015,
Establishing a Level Foundation for Life: Mental Health
Begins in Early Childhood; Working Paper 6.
As covered in Unit 2, resilient individuals are more likely to deal better with adversity
than those with lower resilience. Children and young people face a wide range of
challenges which are a result of threats to their well-being, including maltreatment,
neglect and abuse, as well as more ordinary everyday pressures in families and
schools. All of them however give rise to stress to a greater or lesser degree.
Children and young people who lack resilience will be more likely to respond to stress
by developing longer term problems including anxiety and depression. The more
opportunities that can be offered to children and young people to learn coping
skills, the higher the chance that they will be resilient to stress in all its forms.
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