Promoting resilience in early development is extremely important because you are laying the groundwork for the future. We know that, you know, competence begets competence, and that\u2019s partly because as you go along in development you know, the skills you learn and acquire in one period of development provide you with the tools to tackle the next set of tasks in front of you. The other aspect to this is that many of the fundamental systems that have been implicated in resilience have formative years, early in childhood, so that the learning and developing the capabilities for executive function or self-regulation skills of many different kinds, all those, you know, self-control, to be able to listen, to be able to control your attention, to regulate your emotions, a lot the groundwork in terms of socialization and brain development happens in the very early years of life. So, you\u2019re building both a set of skills to take the next step, you know, you\u2019re learning to walk before you learn to run, but you\u2019re also developing in very important ways and learning from interacting with your environment, most importantly the people who are close to you, your caregivers in your environment, and also through play and exploration you are developing a lot of the fundamental tools and protective systems that appear to be the engines for resilience in later life. So, I think you have both happening, and that\u2019s why investment in early years is so important for life-long resilience. It doesn\u2019t mean that you can\u2019t develop resilience tools later, it just may be more difficult. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
A lot of evidence, over the years, has pointed to the importance of self-regulation in many different forms for resilience, being able control your temper, as well as your attention, to be able to make yourself do something even when you don\u2019t want to, or stop yourself from doing something, even when you do want to, so both inhibitory control and getting up, you know, the self-discipline to do something, like study for that exam, or whatever, even when you don\u2019t want to, these are all extremely important when you\u2019re faced with challenges, and I don\u2019t think it\u2019s surprising that they\u2019re so commonly implicated in the study of resilience. You know, it helps with your problem solving to be able to wait, and evaluate what is happening in certain situations, however if a tiger is after you, you\u2019ve got to, you know, respond quickly, and get going. So, you know, these systems enable you to deploy your adaptive capacity effectively depending on the situation, and young children are just learning self-regulation skills, so they have a back-up system, which is a parent, with good self-regulation skills, so you have an external regulator in the parent that acts on behalf of the child, or tells them what to do, if a child, you know, is unable to make decisions effectively, wait when they should wait, avoid dangerous situations and so forth, and one of the most important jobs of a parent is both to regulate, to be watching out for the child and helping them do what they should be doing, but also the process of interacting with the child, you know, in a loving, organized way, helps the child learn self-regulation skills, and fosters the brain development and systems that will eventually make it possible for a child to monitor their own attention, behaviour and so forth, and really put together a response, as they get older, that is adaptive, planful, you know, the right choice at the right time. A lot of what happens in the middle of danger or adversity has to do with good decision making, about what to pay attention to, what to do and so forth. And these skills are extremely important process, part of the process of adapting to threatening situations and recovering from them. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Promoting resilience in early development is extremely important because you are laying the groundwork for the future. We know that, you know, competence begets competence, and that\u2019s partly because as you go along in development you know, the skills you learn and acquire in one period of development provide you with the tools to tackle […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":39,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"template-text-only.php","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-1727","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1727","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/39"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1727"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1727\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1728,"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1727\/revisions\/1728"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1727"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}