Grandparents, teachers and even bus drivers can build resilient kids
Scientists have spent decades studying what goes wrong in childhood. Northeastern researchers are measuring what goes right — and how those experiences can shape mental health years later.
Grandparents bring “The Gruffalo” to life by doing different voices. They take you to visit lemurs at the zoo. They show you how to grow green onions on the windowsill. And they let you bite into every cookie in the tin when you can’t decide which one you want.
And, as the experience of Northeastern University psychology postdoc Kelsie Lopez shows, these family elders also inspire scientific research.
When Lopez looked at publications in neurodevelopment, the field she chose to pursue at Northeastern’s Center for Cognitive and Brain Health, she noticed a glaring omission. The vast majority of the work focused on adversity — stressful or harmful experiences that make childhood feel unsafe, unstable or unsupported.
Where was the research on things that go right, she wondered?
Together with Northeastern University psychology professor Laurel Gabard-Durnam and colleagues from Bryn Mawr College, in Pennsylvania, Lopez set out to fill the gap. The resulting study, titled The Predictability, Opportunity, and Safety Dimensions of Environmental Variability (POS-DEV) Retrospective Scale: A New Tool to Retrospectively Assess Positive Early Life Experiences, shows that the good side of childhood doesn’t have to get overshadowed by the bad.
The researchers linked positive experiences — such as getting opportunities to learn — to improved mental health in adulthood, even after accounting for the hardships that may have coincided with them.
“Just because you had early life adversity doesn’t necessarily mean you didn’t have positive early life experiences that were also happening in tandem,” Lopez said.
To study these experiences scientifically, researchers have to translate them into numbers. How else do you figure out if Grandma’s bedtime stories made up for the stress of Dad losing his job?
Lopez and her colleagues developed a scale that organized positive experiences around three dimensions — predictability, opportunity and safety — designed as positive counterparts to typical frameworks examining childhood stressors that focus on unpredictability, deprivation and threat.
They then built a questionnaire around them.
The predictability bucket included questions such as whether participants knew who would care for them after school ended. Opportunity and safety-related questions explored if they had a chance to form close relationships or felt physically and emotionally protected.
For each question, a total of around 1,200 participants rated how true a statement was for their childhood on a four-point scale, ranging from “very true” to “not at all true.” The researchers then converted the answers into scores on a scale of 1 to 4, with higher scores reflecting more positive experiences. Participants also completed questionnaires measuring adverse childhood experiences, as well as a survey assessing their current levels of anxiety, depression and resilience. The researchers then analyzed how the positive and adverse childhood experience scores related to those measures of mental health in adulthood.
Looking at the positive and negative experience scores together allowed the researchers to ask an important question. Say two people had similar levels of childhood adversity, but the first also had positive experiences. Would those positive experiences make a measurable difference in the first person’s adult mental health compared with that of the second?
As it turned out, the answer was yes.
Positive childhood experiences were linked with lower depression and anxiety and greater resilience in adulthood — patterns that held up even after researchers accounted for circumstances of hardship, and socioeconomic status. At the same time, unfavorable childhood experiences were associated with higher anxiety and depression.
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In other words, neither type of experience erased the other. Each told the researchers something about adult mental health that the other couldn’t — which is more credit than positive experiences received in the past.
“The fact that we saw these really robust and strong effects of these positive experiences … over and above the degree of adversity someone experienced, but also independent of their socioeconomic status, was really wonderful to see,” Gabard-Durnam said.
Participants, who hailed from diverse socio-economic backgrounds and ranged in age from 18 to 65, fell across the spectrum, ranging from high levels of adversity and positive experiences to low levels of both and every mixture in between. All in all, the results reinforced the central idea that experiencing more adversity didn’t mean someone had fewer positive experiences.
The findings echo what others have found about the ingredients of a positive childhood.
Amanda Winn, director of training and technical assistance at the HOPE National Resource Center, a public health program and research initiative, pointed out that lifelong health has been linked with positive childhood experiences.
They’re “incredibly important,” Winn told Northeastern Global News, adding that research suggests their absence “can be more damaging than the presence of trauma and adversity.”
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Behind those experiences are people who make them possible.
The Northeastern researchers asked participants to indicate which role model they were thinking of when answering each question.
The usual suspects included grandparents, aunts, uncles, teachers, coaches and spiritual leaders who made a positive mark on dozens of young lives reflected in the study.
There were also some surprises.
“My personal favorite response is that somebody nominated their elementary school bus driver,” Gabard-Durnam said.
Another participant named someone from a biker bar.
“It really spanned the whole gamut of people out and about in the world,” Gabard-Durnam said.
“It’s not just caregivers,” Lopez added.
