VULNERABILITY AND RESILIENCE IN EARLY CHILDHOOD INTERVENTIONS

For experts and researchers that working with children and families it is already completely clear nowadays that it can hardly find simple causal links and deterministic relations in the child development - it is likely the result of the complex interplay of numerous environmental and biological factors of human development. Thus, we can speak about risk and protective factors by those impacts which influence the development in some extent. The traditional focus of early childhood intervention lays on mitigation of various risk factors, in some cases on eliminating of risk, therefore can decrease the chance to occur adverse outcomes or achieve a less adverse outcome. However, the efficiency of this approach is inappropriate, since reducing the risks is not sufficient to increase the probability that young children that are vulnerable and/or living in vulnerable families remain on or come to a trajectory to optimal development (Harper Brown, 2014). Accordingly, early intervention focuses on protective factors instead of risk factors more and more. For example, instead of indentifying risk factors of child maltreatment and neglect just as deficiencies and weaknesses of parents, we focus on strengthening protective factors and supporting parents and family building in order to increase their child care and nurturing skills (Stagner & Lansing, 2009). In frames of an early intervention project with social approach, the National Institute for Family and Social Policy (Hungary) adapts methods which are based on strengths, protective factors just as processes of family and individual resilience after identified and reviewed national and international practices and methods, moreover the Institute also trains social professionals that apply these methods.