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Yvonne Roberts asks what the golden ingredient is that sees a child brought up in adversity become a resilient adult.

As part of this week’s 40th anniversary for Radio Four’s In Touch, the only national radio programme for the visually impaired, its presenter Peter White talked about Fiona, a 10-year-old whom he and his wife, Jo, fostered when they had three younger children of their own in 1977. Five years later, Jo threatened to leave if Fiona (who had been in 22 placements by the age of three) wasn’t returned to care, but social services duly collected her. “I felt like an executioner,” White explains.

But what’s particularly interesting is that White now believes that Fiona, aged 34 and a matron in a boarding school, is his “biggest success”. White believes that she “pushed herself” while his three natural children, now in their twenties, have drifted - a state he wouldn’t mind at all, “if they were deliriously happy”.

Recently, I met Emma, a 19-year-old who is made of the same robust material as Fiona. She was placed in care when young and moved repeatedly but she found a social worker prepared to champion her and is now studying for a degree, advising the government on youth issues, has her own flat, and appears not only supremely confident but comfortable in her own skin: a mature, self-confident, motivated young woman.

What is it that makes the Fionas and Emmas of this world? As many social workers can attest, two apparently similar children may experience similar harsh doses of adversity but whereas one will buckle, the second will, paradoxically, use disaster as a springboard if given even a minimum degree of support. This question of resilience has been poorly researched in the UK, not least because we seem to prefer to document failure than investigate the causes of success.

In Australia, however, Moira Rayner, who was until recently director of the Office of the Children’s Rights Commissioner for London, and children’s rights advocate Meg Montague published a paper which examined the issue of the traumatised child who succeeds.¹

What Rayner and Montague discovered is that in the resilient child someone, very early on, left an invaluable imprint which told them, no matter what, they were valued, that they could influence their circumstances and that others have invested high expectations in them so they had still more incentive to survive competently.

That’s the easy part; the hard part is discovering precisely how the imprint was made and ensuring, wherever possible, that a fragile child has early access to it. CC

¹M Rayner, M Montague, Resilient Children and Young People, A Review of the International Literature, Chldren’s Welfare Association of Victoria, Australia, 2001.

Copies available from e-mail admin@cwav.asn.au or mcollen.clare@cwav.asn.au