Educators can also provide confidential support and advice to families seeking guidance in dealing with risk factors and deterrents that hinder resilience. What Communities Can Do Healthy communities are likely to foster resilient children. Public safety is obviously important, as are agencies that provide effective library, medical, psychological, and social services. Schools can link to community agencies to provide referrals to collaborative services, and cooperative programs. Schools can help by informing students and parents of the resources that communities have to offer.
Cooperative programs are especially effective.
The Chicago Botanic Gardens, for example, prepares botanical lessons, conducts teacher workshops, and provides coordinated opportunities for both city and suburban children. Resiliency programs are hardly a panacea for the problems that many children face in school and in life, although various strategies and approaches have had some measure of success. Given the problems and challenges faced by today s children, expanding such efforts through the nurturing support of all adults who work with children seems very much in our national interest. Risk and protective factors in the development of psychopathology. Rutter, M. Psychosocial resilience and protective mechanisms.