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Predicting Your Child’s Future: Success or Struggles
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Most parents wonder and worry about their children’s future. Most would love to be able to predict if they will be successful. Parents hope and believe being a good parent and providing many opportunities for growth is all they can do. Today research is providing predicting possibilities that go far beyond hope and make predicting part of our science.
We have known that some children struggle and suffer, but we are now delving into the whys and their significance. There are important variables that influence children’s inclinations, strengths, weaknesses, abilities, and competences. Knowing these leads us to the predilections for success or struggles and helps you as a parent to best plan what your child needs to become a success in life.
Everyone knows the story of people who rise from poverty, a toxic family life, substandard education and poor opportunities, but despite all, they succeed.
We also have observed children with all the advantages who still struggle. For them success seems always out of reach. Why?
Resiliency is the reason. Research shows that resiliency is the process of children interacting with their environments and staying afloat in the face of adversity. Children possess strengths that can promote well-being and protect them against the influence of risk factors. These protective factors create resilience and success in children. If one or all of these protective factors are weak or missing, the child struggles and suffers.
These protective factors can include positive temperament traits, superior cognitive ability, and/or strong families, peers, schools and communities.
Resilience is the positive capacity of children to cope with stress and adversity. Adverse circumstances may be chronic and consistent or severe and infrequent. Some children who have “at risk” protective factors don’t struggle unless significant adversity strikes. This is the reason that some children who seem balanced and without struggles react in unexpected and disturbing ways when faced with a stress factor, such as the divorce of their parents. Other children with at risk protective factors respond with behavioral problems when they are minimally stressed. An example is the 4-year-old with frequent meltdowns.
Children must draw upon all of their resources: temperament traits, cognitive skills, and environmental resources to counter stress successfully.
Three main variables that make up our resilience protective factors are:
–Temperament
(inborn personality traits )
–Cognitive ability
–Environmental assets
Temperament traits are present at birth and stable by 18 – 24 months. There are four behavioral temperament trait drivers, three learning drivers and two modifier traits. These traits function by helping us remember, control our impulses, solve problems, understand social interaction, complete a task, cooperate, and respond to the daily events. These traits are stable throughout our lives but can be modified with training. An example is how we respond to something new. Some of us are curious and like experiences that are new, but others are cautious and prefer not to be challenged by anything new. Some adapt quickly, others slowly. Some of us have energy to spare and some do not. These traits form the hard wiring for the brain and determine how it functions. The easy child has more positive temperament traits.
Cognitive abilities are inherited and represent our genetically determined abilities and limitations that are possessed at birth. Cognitive abilities are at the foundation of the learning process, and a child’s upper limits of ability are defined by inheritance. How successfully we perform at those upper limits is determined by other elements. Cognitive abilities include our ability to analyze, evaluate, retain information, recall experiences, make comparisons, and determine action. Cognitive weaknesses diminish a child’s capacity to learn and, fortunately, cognitive skills can be improved with training.
The higher the cognitive ability the more protection is displayed when a child faces adversity and stress.
A child’s environment is very important to growth and reaching maximal capabilities. The environment is family, neighborhood (peers) city, state and country. During the first five years both the family and daycare are the dominate influence on the environment as an asset or a liability. The more nurturing bestowed on a child, the more assets are added for that child. A nurturing environment enhances cognitive development and social integration.
