Risk and Resilience in Middle Childhood: Lessons for School Mental Health Promotion

Unresolved mental health issues are associated with numerous negative outcomes, both short and long term, for school-aged children. Although effective interventions exist for many mental health conditions, primary prevention of these maladies, whenever possible, is clearly in a child’s best interest. Mental health promotion in schools is a viable medium for nurturing prevention. Among the most potent influences schools can affect in the efforts to promote mental health are risk and resiliency factors in a child’s environment. Exposure to risk factors is strongly associated with negative mental health outcomes, while the presence of protective factors is strongly predictive of positive mental health outcomes and ultimately pronounced improvements in quality of life. School performance can ultimately be among the most formidable risk or resilience factors, depending on the qualitative and quantitative experience of the individual student. Further, the school has the ability to exert influence on other risk and resilience factors in a student’s environment. This chapter delineates risk and resilience factors that have been found to profoundly affect mental health and quality life, evidence-based practices that have been applied to foster positive outcomes, and provides sufficient foundation on the current knowledge base on risk and resilience to facilitate school planning in programming for maximizing student mental health outcomes.

Keywords: Academic press, ecological perspective, protective factors, resilience, risk, social-emotional functioning.