Masten – protective vs. promotive factors

The most important distinction between a promotive and a protective factor is the idea that promotive factors are helpful for development or good for whatever outcome you’re interested in under any conditions, so good parents are great for children no matter how much adversity they have in their lives, they play many roles in ordinary human development. Protective factors refer to the factors that make a difference under very high-risk conditions so they, they provide special support or special role when there’s a threat, a significant threat in place. And usually people are making the distinction that under very high-risk conditions parents for example may take different kinds of action than they do in under every day circumstances. So parents could be both, they can be promotive, cause it’s always good to have an effective parent in your life for development, but under very threatening circumstances parents may spring into action and provide, you know, a different kind of support, a different kind of protection to their children ranging from you know, jumping in front of you know, an attacking dog, to intervening to make, you know help their child avoid a threatening situation that maybe does not need to be have to be dealt with, parents can monitor how much exposure children have to horrible  things that are happening outside in the world or on television, through the media. So, you know it’s been an important distinction, and I think it’s an important one to make, that some things work under all conditions, and other kinds of protections have a special role to play when things are very difficult.  

Well one of the things that I’ve learned from all of my own research on resilience, but also the larger body of work on resilience, because by this point, after the four waves, there’s a lot of findings on resilience in young people and adults, and a lot of that work points to the same list of protective factors, and I’ve started calling that the short list. And what the short list is, is a list of the most commonly observed protective factors in studies of resilience, and that list includes things like: good problem solving skills, close relationships with competent and caring adults, the motivation and confidence to try to respond when you’re going through difficulties, faith, hope, belief in yourself – there’s many things on that short list but these, the short list really means that there are some fundamental, protective systems that have evolved over many generations and probably thousands of years in both human evolution, biological evolution, and also in our cultures. I think what the short list means is that we have some tools for resilience that are part of our human legacy, and they’re very important for helping us adapt under many different circumstances and the biggest threat in the lives of children, or adults, is when these important tools for resilience are harmed or shut down, or destroyed by maybe the adversity that is occurring. And keeping them going, restoring them, is an extremely important priority to promote resilience in the context of disasters or any other kind of adversity.