Children’s resilience, loneliness and hope: The Positive Psychology perspectives

In this paper, we shall present theoretical approaches and new research on the implications of positive psychology for understanding children’s resilience, happiness, and hope. Young people keep contacts with family, friends, “friends of friends” and total strangers. Social networking has been growing in richness, enabling diverse routes to challenge the social isolation. Yet, many children and adolescents continue to feel alone even among friends. Our responsibility is to sensitize families and schools to the children’s distress and to promote innovative research as well as prevention and intervention programs, among others. In this paper, we shall discuss the predictive roles of individual and systemic risk and protective factors (such as family support and schools’ empowerment) within the positive psychology approach, in order to provide clarification of developmental trends.