Excerpts from: Children of the Garden Island

Emmy E. Werner

The author of this article was part of a research team based in Hawaii, a group of islands in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, and a state of the USA. Werner begins her article by describing the island of Kauai, which is called the ‘Garden Island’. It may be found in the northwest part of the island chain, and has a varied landscape including mountains, gorges, beaches and forests. It was first settled by Polynesian people many centuries ago, and people have always remarked on its beauty, hence its name. Werner describes its inhabitants and the purposes of their study:

The 45 000 inhabitants of Kauai are for the most part descendants of immigrants from Southeast Asia and Europe who came to the island to work on the sugar plantations with the hope of finding a better life for their children. Thanks to the islanders’ unique spirit of cooperation, my colleagues and I have been able to carry out a longitudinal study on Kauai that has lasted for more than three decades. The study has two principal goals: to assess the long-term consequences of prenatal and perinatal stress and to document the effects of adverse early rearing conditions on children’s physical, cognitive and psychosocial development…

She then identifies the participants in their study, and the way in which their focus shifted to the children who were resilient in the face of a number of difficulties:

We chose to study the cohort (group) of 698 infants born on Kauai in 1955, and we followed the development of these individuals at one, two, 10, 18 and 31 or 32 years of age. The majority of the individuals in the birth cohort – 422 in all – were born without complications, following uneventful pregnancies, and grew up in supportive environments.
But as our study progressed we began to take a special interest in certain ‘high risk’ children who, in spite of exposure to reproductive stress, discordant (harsh, inharmonious) and impoverished home lives and uneducated, alcoholic or mentally disturbed parents, went on to develop healthy personalities, stable careers and strong interpersonal relations. We decided to try to identify the protective factors that contributed to the resilience of these children…

Werner describes the sources of data which they used to collect information about the group:

From the outset of the study we recorded information about the material, intellectual and emotional aspects of the family environment, including stressful life events that resulted in discord or disruption of the family unit. With the parents’ permission we also were given access to the records of public-health, educational and social-service agencies and to the files of the local police and the family court. My collaborators and I also administered a wide range of aptitude, achievement and personality tests in the elementary grades and in high school. Last but not least, we gained the perspectives of the young people themselves by interviewing them at the age of 18 and then again when they were in their early 30’s.

She then writes briefly of the number who suffered complications prior to or around their births:

Of the 698 children in the 1955 cohort, 69 were exposed to moderate prenatal or perinatal stress, that is complications during pregnancy, labor or delivery. About 3 percent of the cohort – 23 individuals in all – suffered severe prenatal or perinatal stress; only 14 infants in this group lived to the age of two. Indeed, nine of the 12 children in our study who died before reaching two years of age had suffered severe perinatal complications.

She goes on to consider the proportion of the children who were affected by disabilities and/or mental health problems:

Some of the surviving children became ‘casualties’ of a different kind in the next two decades of life. One out of every six children (116 children in all) had physical or intellectual handicaps of perinatal or neonatal origin that were diagnosed between birth and the age of two and that required long-term specialized medical, educational or custodial care. About one out of every five children (142 in all) developed serious learning or behavior problems in the first decade of life that required more than six months of remedial work. By the time the children were 10 years old, twice as many children needed some form of mental-health service or remedial education (usually for problems associated with reading) as were in need of medical care.

By the age of 18, 15 percent of the young people had delinquency records and 10 percent had mental health problems requiring either in- or outpatient care. There was some overlap among these groups… As we followed these children from birth to the age of 18 we noted two trends: the impact of reproductive stress diminished with time, and the developmental outcome of virtually every biological risk condition was dependent on the quality of the rearing environment…

Werner then writes about the factors which seemed to enable children to overcome birth and/or other life difficulties:

This could already be seen when the children were just two years old: toddlers who had experienced severe perinatal stress but lived in middle-class homes or in stable family settings did nearly as well on developmental tests of sensory-motor and verbal skills as toddlers who had experienced no such stress…

How many children could count on such a favourable environment? A sizable minority could not. We designated 201 individuals – 30 percent of the surviving children in this study population – as being high-risk children because they had experienced moderate to severe perinatal stress, grew up in chronic poverty, were reared by parents with no more than eight grades of formal education or lived in a family environment troubled by discord, divorce, parental alcoholism or mental illness. We termed the children ‘vulnerable’ if they encountered four or more such risk factors before their second birthday. And indeed, two-thirds of these children (129 in all) did develop serious learning or behaviour problems by the age of 10 or had delinquency records, mental-health problems or pregnancies by the time they were 18.

Yet one out of three of these high-risk children – 72 individuals altogether – grew into competent young adults who loved well, worked well and played well. None developed serious learning or behaviour problems in childhood or adolescence… By the end of their second decade of life they had developed into competent, confident and caring people who expressed a strong desire to take advantage of whatever opportunities came their way to improve themselves…

We identified a number of protective factors in the families, outside the family circle and within the resilient children themselves that enabled them to resist stress. Some sources of resilience seem to be constitutional: resilient children … tend to have characteristics of temperament that elicit positive responses from family members and strangers alike. We noted these same qualities in adulthood. They include a fairly high activity level, a low degree of excitability and distress and a high degree of sociability … When they entered elementary school, their classroom teachers observed their ability to concentrate on their assignments and noted their problem-solving and reading skills. Although they were not particularly gifted, these children used whatever talents they had effectively…

Factors within the resilient children that helped them resist stress: They were well-liked by other people / people responded positively to them They made friends easily and had between one and several close friends They had a high activity level – they are active rather than passive people They were sociable, friendly people They did not easily get excited or stressed They had an ability to concentrate on assignments and tasks They had problem-solving and reading skills

We could also identify environmental factors that contributed to these children’s ability to withstand stress. The resilient youngsters tended to come from families having four or fewer children, with a space of two years or more between themselves and the next sibling. In spite of poverty, family discord or parental mental illness, they had the opportunity to establish a close bond with at least one caretaker from whom they received positive attention during the first years of life.

The nurturing might come from substitute parents within the family (such as grandparents, older siblings, aunts or uncles) or from the ranks of regular baby-sitters. As the resilient children grew older they seemed to be particularly adept at recruiting such surrogate parents when a biological parent was unavailable…

Resilient children also seemed to find a great deal of emotional support outside their immediate family. They tended to be well liked by their classmates and had at least one close friend, and usually several. They relied on an informal network of neighbours, peers and elders for counsel and support in times of crisis and transition. They seem to have made school a home away from home, a refuge from a disordered household. When we interviewed them at 18, many resilient youths mentioned a favourite teacher who had become a role model, friend and confidant and was particularly supportive at times when their own family was beset by discord or threatened with dissolution.

A summary of this study’s findings:

With the help of these support networks, the resilient children developed a sense of meaning in their lives and a belief that they could control their fate. Their experience in effectively coping with … stressful life events built an attitude of hopefulness that contrasted starkly with the feelings of helplessness and futility that were expressed by their troubled peers.