The purpose of this chapter is to help explain why some children in high-risk circumstances develop more cognitive competence than would be expected considering their backgrounds. One of the factors, we believe, is a certain stress resistance in their families.

The sample of families that we are investigating includes some whose children may become school dropouts, delinquent, drug users, or pregnant within the next 5 years. We have, however, seen some high-risk families whose children appear to have escaped these outcomes. We shall report on the characteristics of these families that seem likely to prevent the poor outcomes that so often befall children in these neighborhoods.

Garmezy (1982) has stimulated great interest in the study of stress-resistant children. In our study we have been impressed by the fact that some high-risk families protect their children from the dangers that surround them. In these cases it seems to us that it is the families, rather than the children, that are stress-resistant. This is not to deny that there are factors in the children that help them resist the influence of a high-risk environment. Even if exposed to such dangers as drugs or alcohol, they are able to cope with them.

Proximal versus distal variables

One purpose of this chapter is to distinguish between stress-resistant children and stress-resistant families. In order to conceptualize this difference we need to recognize that risk variables differ from one another in the degree to which they directly impinge on the child. Social class, for example, is an important risk variable – we shall see later how powerfully social class predicts cognitive outcome. But social class does not impinge directly on the child.