Promoting Resilience for Children Who Experience Family Homelessness: Opportunities To Encourage Developmental Competence

AbstractA developmental perspective on resilience is needed to inform policies and programs that respond to family homelessness. Homelessness and the experiences associated with it can threaten and disrupt healthy development in children, contributing to worse academic achievement, more emotional and behavioral problems, and lower levels of developmental competence in a variety of other domains. Scholarship on resilience and risk provides a framework for understanding how and why this happens, identifying ways to prevent and compensate for the negative impacts of the homeless experience on children. We first explain the fundamental concepts underlying this framework. Through a review of literature on risk and resilience among children in homeless families, we identify two ordinary but powerful adaptive systems that help children avoid or bounce back from the negative effects of homelessness on development-positive parenting and child self-regulation. We argue that policymakers and homeless services providers can enhance, support, and facilitate these systems to achieve better outcomes for children.IntroductionFamilies who use shelter services vary widely in their current and past experiences, including differences in the presence of risk factors that increase the likelihood of poor outcomes, of promotive factors that encourage positive outcomes for all children, and of protective factors that shield children from negative outcomes associated with risk. These factors come together in complex ways to influence child development, contributing to an increased likelihood of maladaptation and problems or of positive adaptation and success. Many children in homeless families consequently manifest resilience, showing competence in important developmental outcomes, whereas others do not fare as well. The purpose of this article is to apply a developmental framework on resilience and risk to elucidate the contexts and processes of family homelessness. Our focus is specifically on children who are homeless with their families, with an emphasis on families in shelter that follows from existing research. We briefly present the basic components of a developmental resilience and risk framework, and then we review the literature on children who experience family homelessness. We conclude with a discussion of opportunities for providers and other stakeholders to encourage the ordinary processes of adaptation and promote resilience.Resilience and Risk in DevelopmentResilience in development refers to positive adaptation during or after some threat or disturbance (Luthar, 2006; Masten et al., 2009). Resilience describes the functioning of an individual who has encountered some type of risk but continues to function competently nonetheless. Risk'factors are events, circumstances, or characteristics that have been associated with worse outcomes in studies involving groups of individuals (Rutter, 2012; Zolkoski and Bullock, 2012). Meanwhile, promotive and protective factors are events, circumstances, or characteristics that predict positive developmental outcomes in general or have even greater positive effects in contexts of risk, respectively (Masten et al., 2009). Risks threaten positive development, whereas promotive and protective factors indicate the presence of broader adaptive systems that act to keep positive development on course despite experiences of risk (Masten and Obradovic, 2006). Furthermore, the most effective adaptive systems are "ordinary"; that is, conditioned by evolution and society to be present in the lives of most children, such as the presence of a caring parent or other adult and the ability to control one's own emotional arousal with increasing success. Resilience happens because of effective adaptive systems that circumvent or compensate for the ways that risk can interfere with positive development. The day-to-day mechanisms or means by which risks or adaptive systems bring about their effects are called the processes of risk or processes of adaptation, respectively. …