Innovating resilience promotion: Integrating cultural practices, social ecologies and development-sensitive conceptual strategies for advancing child well-being

This chapter's goal is to interrogate the intersectional significance of race and socioeconomic status for children of varied statuses of human vulnerability. It provides a context-connected, culture acknowledging, systems model and identity formation perspective. This strategy is ideal for delineating behavioral consistencies (and interpreting inconsistencies). When operationalized with programming opportunities, it accommodates the nation's diversity and aids the interpretation of findings. This chapter is divided into several sections: First, it interrogates critical insights afforded by a “resiliency-vulnerability” approach; second, it draws attention to the roles of culture, culturally competent practices, and justice-informed contexts for children's perception-based “meaning making” as each—increasingly with age—navigates multiple social ecologies. Third, it shifts to and emphasizes the intersectionally relevant factors of race (e.g., identifiability and skin color stereotyping) and socioeconomic status (i.e., both low resourced and privileging situations); and following a synthesis of the previous sections—as Section 4—it then frames the cumulative and integrated conceptual strategy (phenomenological variant of ecological systems theory: PVEST). In Section 5, the chapter presents theory-focused exemplars to illustrate the theory's efficacy, which are followed by results of two recent preliminary application projects. Salient is that the two projects presenting preliminary findings add to and afford important child development insights salient as strategies for neutralizing intersectionality effects and maximizing resiliency outcomes. To sum, synthesizing several decades of scholarship, theorizing, contemporary research and programming application efforts, the handbook chapter concludes with suggested strategies for creating more informed policies and practices relevant to all children's overall resiliency, healthy development and well-being.