A preventive intervention for enhancing resilience among highly stressed urban children

Abstract

Describes the development and evaluation of a pilot 12-session, school-based preventive intervention designed to enhance resilience among inner-city children who have experienced major life stress. Thirty-six 4th-6th grade children participated in the intervention in groups of 5-8 co-led by school personnel. The curriculum focussed on understanding feelings in oneself and others, perspective-taking, social problem-solving, dealing with solvable and unsolvable problems, and building self-efficacy and esteem. Pre-post evaluation showed significant improvement among participants on teacher-rated indices of learning problems and task orientation and on child ratings of perceived self-efficacy, realistic control attributions and anxiety. Program limitations and factors that restrict generalization are considered and new directions for program development and research are proposed.