Healthy youth development as a model for youth health promotion. A review.

Risk and resilience as a conceptual model has captured the imagination of researchers and program planners over the past decade. The concept assumes that stress is a universal experience; success in life is less determined by the stress experienced and more related to the resources available to address the stress. Likewise, it assumes that negative life events are not rare experiences; neither do such experiences inexorably lead to a life of deprivation. Rather, resiliency research questions why some who are reared under adverse circumstances appear to live healthy and productive lives while others do not appear to overcome the adversities experienced in early life. Garmezy (1) defined resilience as “the capacity to recover and maintain adaptive behavior after insult.” Those who are resilient are flexible. They are not invincible (2) or invulnerable (3). Resilience is not a trait (4) that some have and others do not; rather, it represents an interaction between the individual and the environment. Resilience implies resistance to threat, but it is a graded phenomenon. Cumulative risk can defeat the most resilient individual. Rutter (4) noted that resilience is interactive with risk; it is developmental in nature, stemming from biology and experiences earlier in life and protective factors may operate in different ways at different stages of development (e.g., parental protectiveness in infancy is highly protective, but in adolescence comparable parental oversight may impede healthy development).