Is the idea that "children are resilient" real or a myth?

I think that children are resilient. In the face of most “normal” childhoods with parental mistakes abounding they grow up fine. Even in the face of abuse, they can grow up to be productive members of society.

The saying also comes from children’s ability to withstand physical pain and to bounce back from injuries.

Yes I think that by nature that children are resilient by design. Their bones themselves have more elasticity and can respond and heal from trauma easier and the forgetfulness of childhood hurts seems to be a gift of their undeveloped psyches. But this same passivity in the face of trauma can lead to a child being neglected and abused to an enormous degree which can certainly have lasting scars.

I think I would rather call it adaptive.

D.W. Winnicott, the British Object Relations Psychoanalyst wrote several papers on this issue, and also books for lay-people, explaining “resilience” in children and what can and cannot be expected from it. He is widely considered to have been the world’s foremost expert. I’m sure there is a Wiki entry for him.

It’s real. But sadly, eventually even children can be broken….... :(

How does one measure resilience? Does it mean being able to function as an adult after trauma or abuse as a child? Does it mean not being damaged or having residual pain? I think it is a blanket statement that is almost meaningless; obviously some children bouce back from very abusive childhoods or injuries and some don’t. Who knows what the person might have become if they were not subjected to hurt?

Resilience should not be taken to mean invulnerability to lasting harm from emotional or sexual abuse.

They may not understand that their horrible experiences of abuse are abnormal and the the force secrecy about them are part of the abuse.

There is ample evidence concerning the lasting harm to their self-esteem and their psychosexual development that, without treatment, may make them unable to trust others or invest themselves in healthy intimate relationships as adults.

@pdworkin, I’ll look that up. Thanks.

@pdworkin
Yes thank you. The Wiki on Donald Winnicott is an interesting read.
It caused me to reflect on my mother.

Resilient? What does that mean? Are we talking about physical survival? Psychological survival? In either case, what level of survival? Is simple survival enough, or do you require some kind of average standard level of happiness or something?

Whenever I think about what children can survive, I think of central Africa, or of Jerzy Kosinski’s “The Painted Bird.” People are resilient enough to survive many horrors. They end up with PTSD and survivor’s guilt and all kinds of things. However, I’ll bet most of them prefer that survival to the alternative. In my book, that’s resilience.

I don’t think children are as resilient as parents would like to delude themselves that they are.

I think Resilient means….a child can be harmed, but if moved out of the harmful environment early enough, it has less of an impact on them growing up than it would if they weren’t removed until they were older.

I don’t think that children are resilient. Don’t sad children turn into angry adults? Just because kids seem to adapt well to the worst of situations, what happens in childhood has a hand in creating what that child will become. Saying that children are resilient is perhaps a way for an adult to make light of being a constant disappointment.

@jamielynn2328 Yes. Constant, unrelenting unhappiness. But…a child can handle one freaky incident and rebound better than an adult who undergoes that same freaky incident.

If someone suggested that you reference Stephen J Hawking to understand space-time better, would you argue it out on here with your own ideas of what it might be, or would you go do a little reading?

We, as a society, are slowly turning it into a myth.

The degree of resilience in people be they child or adult seems entirely individual. Some suffer the most horrendous experiences and come out on top, while others of us go through, what some might consider, lesser traumas and are completely broken by the experience.

@Blondesjon
We, as a society, are slowly turning it into a myth.
Expound please

Fact from fiction, truth from diction. I would say actually children are quite resilient; but technically they are not because of the intervention of adults. How children deal with what seem to be major mind popping events or even simple interactions goes 1st to how mom and pop handled it and then the community they grow up in. Just look around the world, many things that are everyday here are anything but, there. There are many examples but one that stood out to me is I was watching a documentary about the poorest places on earth. Somewhere in South or Central America the film makers were shooting and they were following families that will go daily to the city dump yes the place where all the trash is even with children who still seemed to be in diapers if what you could call what they were wearing diapers and they would pick through this trash; and it had to smell bad because the workers there wore masks. They would look for items they could use back at their shack or sell for money. One boy was walking along and seen something like a potato he picked it up, examined it, wiped it on his shirt and started to eat it. I feel most kids here in the US if they had to eat like that or do those things it would really mess with their heads because here we don’t see that as normal much less positive. But in that nation it was very normal, like nations where there is conflict or starvation and children routinely see death even as toddlers. They get use to it because the adults are use to it. If the adults fell apart each time a dead body was discovered I think those kids would have gone mad by the time they were 12yr old.

Physically, children are considerably more resilient: their bones still have a large amount of cartilage in them.
Mentally, I’d say that a child’s mind hasn’t gelled yet: the bad things remain inside, but there’s still time to balance them out.

It’s been my general experience that as I mature, and develop better coping skills, I can handle a lot more “shit happens” events.

Children will form personalities around events that occur early in life. A very young animal or human deprived of maternal comfort and fed only food will be measurably, and severely abnormal for life. Adults more easily could adapt to this experience, it’s not relevant to the developmental stage.

Children are tough as hell, but don’t take it for granted. Adults of any society must yeild to the needs of the next generation.

Ever wonder why those religions where the first born are sacrificed are no longer around.

Just a little Darwinian magicks at work.

Having two children, who have experienced severe traumas and neglect in their young lives, it seems an important step to ask a child directly how they perceive and define resilience. In particular, hearing how they understand “the thing” that brings about the need to be resilient can a go along way toward understanding their experience of resilience.

Read Dr. Bruce Perry, The Boy Who Was Raised As A Dog, for information on
a) how the brain develops (or ceases to develop) in order to protect the personality from destruction after/during trauma;
b) how to assist the growing child’s brain – literally, the physical brain – from developing
in ways that will not make him dysfunctional later in life.
A child who’s exposed to ill-treatment or trauma will adapt (as @oratio and @jamielynn2328 have noted) in order to survive and carry on. This doesn’t mean his or her psyche continues to develop in a functional way. It means it’s developed a coping strategy, such as, perhaps, distrust, despair, shutdown, magical thinking, obsession, false pleasing behaviors, splitting. You can imagine many more. According to Perry, not only the thinking process but the actual physical brain, still in development in childhood, will
develop around the need to protect the growing person from incomprehensible shock.
Interventions work, but they need to take into account the likelihood that the brain cannot function at full capacity, and the therapist must address the child at the age where the hurt occurred. That’s why telling a hurt person to shape the fuck up never, never works. Their brain can’t do it.

If you take a kitten and cover it’s eyes the part of the brain responsible for vision will not develop. This is a piece of evidence used to explain the idea of a “critical window” for development.

Afterward, with the visor off, the feline will never recover to “normal levels”

Severe trauma, psychological or otherwise can lead to near permanent change, that would not have the same effect later in life.