What Makes Some Children More Resilient?

June 28, 2013, 6:10 p.m. ET

What Makes Some Children More Resilient?

ALISON GOPNIK

The facts are grimly familiar: 20% of American children grow up in poverty, a number that has increased over the past decade. Many of those children also grow up in social isolation or chaos. This has predictably terrible effects on their development.

There is a moral mystery about why we allow this to happen in one of the richest societies in history. But there is also a scientific mystery. It’s obvious why deprivation hurts development. The mystery is why some deprived children seem to do so much better than others. Is it something about their individual temperament or their particular environment?The pediatrician Tom Boyce and the psychologist Jay Belsky, with their colleagues, suggest an interesting, complicated interaction between nature and nurture. They think that some children may be temperamentally more sensitive than others to the effects of the environment—both good and bad.

They describe these two types of children as orchids and dandelions. Orchids grow magnificently when conditions are just right and wither when they aren’t. Dandelions grow about the same way in a wide range of conditions. A new study by Elisabeth Conradt at Brown University and her colleagues provides some support for this idea.

They studied a group of “at risk” babies when they were just five months old. The researchers recorded their RSA (Respiratory Sinus Arrhythmia)—that is, how their heart rates changed when they breathed in and out. Differences in RSA are connected to differences in temperament. People with higher RSA—heart rates that vary more as they breathe—seem to respond more strongly to their environment physiologically.

Then they looked at the babies’ environments. They measured economic risk factors like poverty, medical factors like premature birth, and social factors like little family and community support. Most importantly, they also looked at the relationships between the children and their caregivers. Though all the families had problems, some had fewer risk factors, and those babies tended to have more stable and secure relationships. In other families, with more risk factors, the babies had disorganized and difficult relationships.

A year later, the researchers looked at whether the children had developed behavior problems. For example, they recorded how often the child hurt others, refused to eat or had tantrums. All children do things like this sometimes, but a child who acts this way a lot is likely to have trouble later on.

Finally, they analyzed the relationships among the children’s early physiological temperament, their environment and relationships, and later behavior problems. The lower-RSA children were more like dandelions. Their risky environment did hurt them; they had more behavior problems than the average child in the general population, but they seemed less sensitive to variations in their environment. Lower-RSA children who grew up with relatively stable and secure relationships did no better than low-RSA children with more difficult lives.

The higher-RSA children were more like orchids. For them, the environment made an enormous difference. High-RSA children who grew up with more secure relationships had far fewer behavior problems than high-RSA children who grew up with difficult relationships. In good environments, these orchid children actually had fewer behavior problems than the average child. But they tended to do worse than average in bad environments.

From a scientific perspective, the results illustrate the complexity of interactions between nature and nurture. From a moral and policy perspective, all these children, dandelions and orchids both, need and deserve a better start in life. Emotionally, there is a special poignancy about what might have been. What could be sadder than a withered orchid?