The CMHS Approach to Enhancing Youth Resilience and
Preventing Youth Violence in Schools and Communities

For more information contact: Bernard S. Arons, M.D., Director, Center for Mental Health Services,
The Parklawn Building, 5600 Fishers Lane, Room 17-105, Rockville, Maryland 20857
1-800-789-2647 • www.mentalhealth.org

How to Intervene: What Programs Work?
What Are the Issues?

Over the last decade, researchers have developed a considerable scientific knowledge base regarding the fostering of resilience and the prevention of violence. Unfortunately, practitioners and policy makers have not always used this knowledge in creating programs, and all too often, these programs have not worked (Elliott and Tolan, 1998). Therefore, CMHS insists on the proposal and implementation of programs which have a solid base of evidence of their effectiveness.

Repeatedly, researchers stress that communities must be truly committed to these programs because the time required to overcome negative influences of disadvantaged neighborhoods, stressed families, poor school adjustment and performance, and delinquent gangs or peer networks is measured in years, not days or hours (Elliott and Tolan, 1998). Furthermore, researchers stress that the most effective interventions are those in which multiple systems that have an impact on children—families, schools, community agencies, the faith community, and other such entities—collaborate to decrease risk factors and enhance protective factors. Ideally, a committee to plan and execute an intervention would consist of school and university personnel, parents, families, other caregivers, neighbors, medical and mental health providers, public health authorities, law enforcement professionals, faith organizations, other community groups, and both governmental and nongovernmental organizations.

Because of the multiplicity of risk and protective factors for violence, preventive interventions should be guided by theory that suggests the causal mechanisms that link these factors to future violence. Theory plays a critical role in specifying how different risk and protective factors interrelate and how and when they should be addressed through intervention. For example, it is common knowledge that the experiences of young children are shaped by the coping strategies of their parents, other family members, and/or extra-familial caregivers. It is not surprising, then, that findings from studies of early childhood education programs show a strong connection between improvements in family functioning and parenting behavior and decreases in delinquent and antisocial behavior among children in adolescence.

One critical component of early intervention programs is teaching parents how to talk to their children in a manner that promotes the child's acquisition of language. Hart and Risley (1995) found that if a positive developmental trajectory of a child’s vocabulary acquisition was not established by the time the child entered elementary school, the child had a very high chance, like many children raised in poverty, of entering high school lacking the vocabulary used in more advanced textbooks. They concluded:

Children’s early interactions set up an entire general approach to words as symbols for experience.…Parent talk defines and labels what children should notice and think about the world, their family, and themselves and suggests how interesting and important various objects, events, and relationships are. Words and sentences, internalized as symbols, become a means for organizing experience and rationalizing and relating it, as well as the basis for logical thinking, problem solving, and self-control. The words and expressions that give utterance and preciseness to talk (and eventually, writing) to other people also serve when talking to oneself as thinking. (Hart and Risley, 1995, pp. 99–100)

Other useful components of a program are training teachers to teach cognitive and behavioral skills to students and redefining schools to include families and communities, thereby providing adult supervision during the “violent hours” between 3:00 and 6:00 p.m. (Elliott, Hamburg, and Williams, 1998).