Building Resilience in All Children: A Public Health Equity Approach

In this chapter, we present a conceptual framework for the promotion of resilience in children that integrates concepts from the study of resilience with a public health and health equity approaches to improve behavioral health at the population level. This chapter begins with a review of resilience, public health, and health equity concepts and describes how these perspectives can be integrated within a broad framework for the promotion of health and prevention of dysfunction that is equitable for all children. We then present examples of evidence-based preventive interventions and policies that have successfully implemented components of this framework in the child, family, and community/organizational domains. Given our focus on promoting resilience, we limit discussion and examples of universal, selective, and indicated preventive interventions to those designed to create resources for children not diagnosed with behavioral health disorder, although the framework could readily be extended to interventions for children with clinical levels of dysfunction. Finally, we provide an overview of how the framework might be used by stakeholder to create resources in their communities that will promote resilience, as well as examples of tools currently available to assist planners in this process.