Hello, this time we're going to discuss adaptive systems in the child. These systems are in the child in the sense that a child or young person is walking around with them. But they develop over the course of many years as a person interacts with their parents and other people and other things in the environment. One of the most powerful adaptive systems in human life is a human brain in good working order. The human brain is an amazing tool for learning and for adapting, and it plays an incredible role in problem solving and planning out solutions and overcoming adversity. And the human brain of course develops over many, many years, and through many interactions. In, with our family, in the education system we hone these skills over a long period of time. And, the human brain to be healthy has to have both, good nutrition. And learning opportunities as well as the support of other people and cultures that support the development of the capacities of human brain function. And as you're probably aware there's a lot of research going on now all over the world to try to learn more about how the brain works. And how we can foster better and better and healthier development of the human brain so that we maximize the potential that children have for problem solving, for learning, and all the many other things that the brain is capable of doing. We also are motivated to adapt. This has been recognized for decades, that human beings have a powerful reward system for doing things in the world, for making things happen. And you can see this easily in very young children. When children learn to make things happen, they learn to splash water in the bathtub or to throw Cheerios off the high chair, or they're just learning to walk. You can see the excitement. The pleasure and the thrill that children get out of making things happen in the world, of being successful. We sometimes call this agency. Human beings get a powerful sense of pleasure and reward from doing things successfully in the world. And this is an incredible engine for learning and overcoming adversity. And this powerful system can be shut down. If you don't provide children with oppor, opportunities to learn and do things, if they're sitting alone by themselves in a crib all the time. This system can shut down. And it's incredibly important that we nurture the sense of mastery and that we give children opportunities to succeed in ways in the environment that build their sense of accomplishment. Good parents and good teachers are very good at building mastery motivation in children. Another powerful system that's related to mastery motivation is called self efficacy, and this just generally refers to our sense of perceived effectiveness. And we get a lot of satisfaction from doing things, but we also build up a sense of ourselves as effective at doing different kinds of things, and this plays a very important role, both in learning and in resilience. The more we succeed and in our life, the more we're inclined to try again the next time something happens, when we're challenged. So, the persistence in the face of challenges is often linked to our sense of self efficacy. And children need experiences in their lives, when they have opportunities that challenge them just the right amount so that they can, master a situation or do something successfully. And it has to be balanced. Because if things are too difficult, or not challenging enough, then we don't get as strong a sense of self efficacy over the years. But this plays a very important role in the persistence that we see in resilience. And one of the great scientists who studied self ef, efficacy, as many of you may know, is Albert Bandura. Another system that's very important for resilience is self-control or, or self-regulation. This is a top down control system that depends on the human brain, of course, but it's specialized to help us control our attention, our actions, and our behavior. So, human beings are able to voluntarily inhibit their impulses to focus their attention in particular ways, to plan for the future and to execute those plans. And these skills develop gradually with experience as children grow up. And these kind of skills sometimes called executive function skills or cognitive control skills are, are really crucial for learning. And increasingly, as you saw in earlier examples in the course people are realizing that for children to go to school and be successful they really need to have these capabilities. They need to be able to control their behavior and their attention, in order to listen to the teacher, to wait their turn, and to absorb the learning experiences in a school environment. Another system that's crucial in human life is meaning. Making meaning out of our own life. This is not as important for very young children as it is for older children and adults. But its significance grows as children grow up. And beliefs that life have, has meaning play an important role in hope and persistence into the future. And we've seen in examples in the course already of personal accounts of resilience like Victor Frankel's book Man's Search for Meaning. Teeda Butt Mam's story, from the book, To Destroy You Is No Loss. These were accounts of extraordinary resilience. But these people really reflect on the power of hope and meaning, as they were trying to survive unbelievable difficulties in concentration camps, or in the killing fields of Cambodia. The cultural beliefs of the family and the community in their faith and in their ethnic and traditional practices play an important role in the shaping of the, these kinds of systems of meaning. There are other important systems and some of them are integrations of the ones I just mentioned. For example, humor, faith, hope, and optimism are all examples of the application of some of these basic adaptive systems that have often been reported in studies of resilience. All of these systems that we've been talking about. Can be studied at many different levels of analysis. There are scientists trying to understand the neurobiology of some of these systems, while others are trying to understand how culture and life experiences shape the development of these systems. In the next part of this module, we are going to talk about how adaptive systems are nurtured in families and relationships, and the power of these social systems for resilience.
