In 1955, a developmental psychologist named Emmy Werner began enrolling participants in a study on the Hawaiian island of Kauai. Her team registered every child born on the island in a twelve-month period. There were 698 of them. Werner intended to follow them for a decade, mapping the early developmental effects of poverty and family stress. What actually happened is that she kept following them for the rest of her career. Assessments were conducted at ages 1, 2, 10, 18, 32, and 40. When Werner eventually retired, the study continued under a new principal investigator. It is now one of the longest-running longitudinal studies of human development in existence, and its findings have profoundly reshaped how psychologists think about childhood adversity.
The finding this piece is about emerged from what Werner did with the sample. She identified 201 of the children as being at high risk. These were children born into poverty. Or into families with less than eight years of education. Or into homes with parental alcoholism, mental illness, chronic discord, violence, or divorce. Or, in the highest-risk cases, several of these things stacked together. What Werner wanted to know was what happened to those children over the following four decades.
Before we continue, you might be interested in what happens to children raised by emotionally immature parents. This short video does a great job of diving into the signs most people completely overlook:
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Continuing with the study:
The mainstream expectation in developmental psychology in 1955, and for some years afterward, was that children raised in these conditions would, in general, do poorly. And two-thirds of them did. By age 18, they had accumulated the outcomes you would expect: mental health problems, teenage pregnancies, delinquency, chronic unemployment, poor educational attainment. The prediction that early adversity produces adult difficulty was, for the majority of the high-risk group, borne out.
What was unexpected was the other third. Roughly 72 of the 201 high-risk children developed into what Werner came to call “competent, caring, confident adults.” They finished school. They held jobs. They formed stable relationships. They raised children of their own without repeating the patterns of the households they had come from. And they showed, on the psychological measures Werner used, roughly the same profile as children from the low-risk half of the cohort.
The question that consumed the rest of Werner’s career was what these children had that the other two-thirds of the high-risk group did not.
In her 1993 paper published in Development and Psychopathology summarising the findings of the study, Werner laid out the pattern that had emerged across the assessments. The resilient children had several things in common. They had an easier temperament as infants, on average. They had somewhat better problem-solving skills by age 10. They developed a sense that they could shape what happened to them, rather than simply being shaped by circumstances. And they had faith of some kind, whether religious or secular, in the world being ultimately navigable.
But the factor Werner emphasised most heavily, across paper after paper of her long career, and the one she came back to in interview after interview, was different from all of these. It was relational. And it involved someone in the child’s life who wasn’t the child’s parents.
The resilient children, nearly without exception, had at least one caring adult who had taken an interest in them.
Not necessarily a mother or a father. The nature of the high-risk sample was that the parents were often the source of the risk itself. What Werner found instead was that the resilient children had a grandparent, an aunt, an uncle, an older sibling, a teacher, a coach, a minister, a neighbour, or a family friend who took the child on. Not necessarily heroically. Not necessarily as a primary caregiver. Simply as an adult who noticed the child, believed in them, offered consistent attention and encouragement, and communicated the message that the child mattered.
Werner emphasised the ordinariness of these figures. They weren’t rescuers in the dramatic sense. They were often people in the community who quietly took an interest. A teacher who asked how the child’s weekend had been. A grandmother who kept a photograph of the child on her refrigerator. A neighbour who talked to the child when they passed on the street. What these figures had in common wasn’t that they solved the child’s problems. It was that they were present, they were consistent, and they treated the child as someone worth attending to.
This finding has been replicated, extended, and refined across many other resilience studies conducted since Werner began her work. In Ann Masten’s 2001 paper in American Psychologist titled “Ordinary Magic,” which drew on Werner’s work alongside data from Masten’s own Project Competence Longitudinal Study, Masten reviewed the accumulating evidence and identified relationships with caring, competent adults as one of the most consistent predictors of resilience across contexts, cultures, and different forms of adversity. Masten’s contribution to the field, captured in the paper’s title, was the observation that resilience wasn’t a rare or exceptional quality. It was the default outcome for children whose basic developmental needs were being met by at least someone. What made the outcomes look extraordinary was the difficulty of the circumstances the children had come through.
Which is worth sitting with. The public narrative around resilience often treats it as a personality trait, something certain children have and others don’t. What the research keeps showing is that this isn’t quite right. Resilience is less a trait than a relational condition. A child who has one consistent, caring adult presence, however modest, has an enormous protective advantage over an otherwise similar child who doesn’t.
The implication for anyone in a position to be that adult, whether as a teacher, a grandparent, a distant relative, a coach, a mentor, or a neighbour, is that the psychological work being done doesn’t require heroism. It requires presence, consistency, and interest. The child who is being written off in their own household as unlikely to amount to anything can be, at the same time, being seen and valued by an adult somewhere else in their world. And the evidence from four decades of following Werner’s cohort suggests that this second relationship, if it exists, does an enormous amount of work in what the child eventually becomes.
The finding is worth naming clearly because it contradicts an assumption most people carry. The assumption is that children raised in difficult households are more or less destined to carry the difficulty forward. Werner’s data says something different. It says a substantial minority of them don’t, and the reason they don’t isn’t a quality they were born with. It’s that somebody, somewhere along the way, took them seriously.
Which is available, in principle, to anyone who spends time around a child in difficulty. You don’t need to be their parent. You don’t need to fix their situation. You need to notice them, to remember what they told you last time, to show up when you said you would, and to treat them as someone whose life you have some genuine interest in.
That, on the current research, is what nearly all the resilient children had in common.
And it’s the factor most missing in the lives of the ones who didn’t make it through.
By Kiran Athar. I write about psychology and human development for a general audience. I am not a psychologist, therapist, or clinician. What follows is my reading of the research on childhood resilience, offered as an interpretation.