Children’s Resilience in Context

Dear Colleagues,

Understanding the improvement of children’s resilience is paramount to the future health and happiness of the world’s population. Resilience is broadly defined as the capacity to adapt successfully and achieve healthy functioning during or following adverse events or circumstances (Southwick et al., 2014). Human resilience is multidimensional, as many interpersonal characteristics (e.g., hope, persistence, agreeableness) and structural supports (e.g., community belongingness, mentorship, medical care) can make up a child’s “resilience tool kit”. Given recent world events, including wars, climate change, the global pandemic, and rising mental health diagnoses during childhood, this Special Issue will help us to better understand what “resilience tool kit” items are essential for survival and thriving amid current adverse childhood trends. More specifically, the Special Issue will highlight both interpersonal and system-level strengths that buffer against or ameliorate the consequences of adverse circumstances to support children’s positive development. We will carefully consider both qualitative and quantitative works that clearly measure children’s “resilience tool kit” items, as well as provide a clear definition and measurement of the adverse circumstances in which such tools are essential (i.e., context), with preference for longitudinal work. We believe that the resulting Special Issue will offer practical intervention points for parents, caregivers, educators, and practitioners to improve children’s health and enable them to thrive.

Dr. Ashley M.J. Fraser
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Children is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• adaptation
• adverse experiences
• childhood
• context
• hope
• mental health
• positive development resilience
• strengths
• war