The Adversity And Resilience Of Support-less Children

As a group of vulnerable children,support-less children have aroused more attention under the governmental goal of including more children who are not in extreme adversity but still need help.However,empirical research on support-less children is not abundant.Among the existing literature,some are the discussion of psychological and behavioral problems of support-less children,others are suggestions for social welfare policies for these children.Therefore,this study aims to answer the following questions from the perspective of resilience.Firstly,to understand the development dilemma and causes of support-less children by comparing the living conditions of support-less children,left-behind children(a type of distressed children often discussed in the country),and the control group(children who are not considered facing adversity in development).Secondly,to analyze the adaptation of support-less children by comparing the development outcomes of the three groups of children.Finally,to explore the impact of self-reliance as a possible internal resilience protective factor on their development outcomes,and whether their self-reliance will be affected by different ways of raising and education.Study 1 interviewed 94 children from three groups: the support-less(29 children),the left-behind(50 children),and the control group(15 children).Content analysis was adopted to code and analyze the interview data,and it was found that the adversity of the support-less children was severer than the other two groups.The main cause of the distress was the weak support of the core family while parents were the key members.These indicated that support-less children were indeed an extremely vulnerable group that needed urgent attention.Study 2 collected self-reported data of 516 children from three groups(148 support-less;115 left-behind;253 control)on adversity,depression,sense of security,emotional symptoms,behavior problems,hyperactivity,peer relationships,prosocial behavior,and subjective well-being.The results showed that the scores on the adversity of support-less children were higher than the other two groups.There was no significant difference on the scores of depression,emotional symptoms,behavioral problems,hyperactivity,and subjective well-being among the three groups,as for the sense of security,peer relationships,and prosocial behavior,the support-less children were worse than other children.These indicated that support-less children were resilient in some degree,but their development outcomes might vary in different aspects.Study 3 used self-reported questionnaires to measure the development outcomes(same as the indicators used in study 2)of 98 support-less children from two schools,while one is a charity school and the other is a local public school.The self-reliance of these children was also measured using the social distance paradigm.The results showed that all support-less children remain their self-reliance identity,but the protective effect of self-reliance on their development was not found in this study.In addition,different from the hypothesis,the support-less children from the charity school got higher scores on self-reliance than the children from the public school.These indicated that the role of self-reliance as an internal resilience asset needed to be further tested,but accepting help and support didn’t not seem to damage the children’s selfreliance and made them dependent on the welfare system.