Resilient children of parents affected by a dependency : Enfants résilients de parents affectés d'une dépendance

Because of the lack of clear understanding surrounding the notion of resilience and the lack of awareness vis-à-vis the current knowledge, including promotion and intervention programs and research activities, the Office of Research and Surveillance of the Drug Strategy and Controlled Substances Programme, Health Canada, believes it is important to share this information with all Canadians. [...] The risks for children of alcohol- or drug-dependent parents extend well-beyond the risk of developing substance abuse problems of their own, just as the potential risks for children of compulsive gamblers go beyond the risk of becoming addicted to gambling. [...] As the Rydelius study (1981), the absence of a control group of child of non-alcohol-dependent parents makes it impossible to determine whether the presumed resilience factors constitute a more salient distinction between resilient and non-resilient children of alcohol-dependent parents than between resilient and non-resilient children of non-alcohol-dependent parents. [...] The authors define the absence or presence of adjustment problems by drawing a distinction between children whose score falls on either side of the 80th percentile on a composite measure of behavioural problems evaluated by the parents while their children were between the 12 August 2005 ages of 3 and 5. Resilient children are those that obtain a score lower than the 80th percentile on the scale o [...] Interestingly, the authors take into account the degree of severity of the fathers’ alcoholism and the presence or absence of anti-social tendencies in the fathers.