Childhood is considered as an important milestone for overall personal development. Positive personal, social, and environmental experience during childhood shape children to be a better human in the future. However, 28 million children globally have experienced different forms of adversities (e.g. physical, sexual, emotional abuse, maltreatment, poverty, racial discrimination, family or community violence). In Australia, around 2.5 million adults were reported being victim of physical and/or sexual abuse before the age of 15.
These kinds of adversities are particularly high in the case of disadvantaged community. Although adversity can be attributed as motivating factor to a certain extent, in most cases, it is found to disturb the stability or wellness of children causing physical and mental health problems [6-8]. While preventing adversity seems to be an obvious solution to this problem, it is not always practical owing to unavoidable social problems like disasters, wars, conflicts, parent separations. Building a child’s resilience and addressing the source of adversity at the same time is crucial to address this problem.
Resilience is a person’s ability to positively adapt and bounce back from adversities in life. Different factors such as cognition, optimism, self-esteem, positive family relationship, community, and social engagement are found to be associated with resilience outcome. Resilient children have emotional, social and behavioral skills that enable them to deal with adversity and navigate life challenges. Several studies have highlighted the importance of resilience in enhancing mental health and overall wellbeing. This points the need of resilience-based interventions to improve the mental health of children.
Interventions targeting children can be cost-effective and can induce long term impacts. In addition, early intervention has been found to be beneficial for the prevention of mental health problems later in life and also contributes to healthy and productive adults. On the other hand, children from the disadvantaged community have to face a higher burden of adversity, and at the same time, they have lower opportunity or resources to build resilience. This highlights the necessity of impactful interventions to reduce the negative effect of childhood adversity in overall wellbeing among disadvantaged children.
