Psychological aspects of traumatic injury in children and adolescents

Research on resilience in development has shown that the extraordinary resilience and recovery power of children depend on basic human protective systems operating in their favor. This discovery has produced a fundamental change in the frameworks for understanding and helping children at high risk or already in trouble. This shift is evident in changing conceptualization of the goals of prevention and intervention that currently address competence and problems. Strategies for fostering resilience described in this article should be tested in future controlled psychotherapy trials to verify their efficacy on children's protective factors.