Why is resilience hard to achieve for maltreated children? Please provide at least four reasons.

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

Answers may include
a. Their abuse and/or neglect is often characterized by an early onset and enduring nature, which heightens negative consequences (Cicchetti & Toth, 2005). Child maltreatment often occurs in the context of an ongoing relationship, which, particularly those with other family members, typically continues following the incident, allowing for further instances of abuse and neglect. Maltreatment by family members who are supposed to love, protect, and care for you is particularly difficult to understand and assimilate. Such treatment is antithetical to widely held societal values that the family should be a safe, dependable, and nurturing place (American Psychological Association [APA], 1996; Center for Disease Control [CDC], 2014).
b. Children who experience maltreatment can also be confronted with multiple stressful life experiences, rather than an isolated instance of abuse or neglect. Recent research suggests that it is this cumulative exposure to risk that most strongly predicts negative outcomes (Evans, Li & Whipple, 2013).
c. The absence of protective factors in their life. Children’s access to and ability to draw from resources, assets, and protective factors within themselves, their relationships, and their connections to other adaptive systems (Masten, 2014; Wright et al., 2013) are critical in understanding variability in adaptive outcomes following maltreatment.
As the number of risk factors rise, assets and/or resources decline (Cicchetti, Rogosch, Lynch, & Holt, 1993; Masten, 2014).
d. Prior research has shown that familial child maltreatment can significantly disrupt the development of secure attachment (Bernard et al., 2012). In such families, the child’s source of safety and protection is also a source of danger and distress (Charuvastra & Cloitre, 2008), which can lead to difficulty regulating emotions and internalizing secure expectations of support and assistance (Bowlby, 1988; Sroufe, 2005).