The impetus for this change came from the results of several famous studies, most notably the work of Emmy Werner and Ruth Smith. Werner and Smith studied the entire population of children born on the island of Kauai, Hawaii, in 1955, from birth to their early 30s. Furthermore, most of the high-risk children who had developed problems had turned their lives around by their early thirties. How this happens has become the object of resiliency research. Helping it to happen has become the purpose of resiliency-based prevention programs.
Some protective factors are inherent in the nature of resilient people.
Werner and Smith noted that even in infancy there was something different about the high-risk children who never developed serious problems. They were active, affectionate, good-natured infants, alert and autonomous toddlers. It is easy to imagine that such children would develop the characteristics that resiliency researcher Bonnie Benard identifies as the profile of a resilient child. Resilient children, Benard writes, have social competence, meaning that they attract positive attention from others, are empathetic, communicate well, and can find humour in difficult situations. They develop a critical consciousness, which allows them to be aware of the problems in their family or society, and to know that they are not the cause of these troubles.