In my own life, my childhood was filled with a number of different risk and protective factors. Some of the biggest risk factors were the fact that we were poor and did not have a lot of money, therefore I was surrounded by an environment in which I was exposed to neighborhoods where many children did not become resilient and often turned to crime or drug use to cope with their environment of poverty. However, despite such risk factors, I was lucky enough to have a variety of protective factors that I felt are responsible for my own resiliency. One of the biggest was the love and support of my mother and father, whose hard worked enabled me to expand my opportunities by going to college. We also had a good family friend who used to purchase me an annual membership to the Y.W.C.A. My experiences at the Y.W.C.A. taught me a number of skills that helped me become resilient, such as a community support network, sex education, and greater self-confidence from my participation in many of the group activities offered there. Another protective factors was my religious background, which provided me with a strong sense of faith that has helped me weather many crises in my life when I was lacking other protective factors in my environment. Such protective factors enabled me to overcome many barriers to becoming resilient as I developed into a happy and productive adult.
In both Antwone Fisher and Girlfight, we see that Antwone and Diane are exposed to a number of risk factors that act as barriers to their development of resiliency. We also see how race, ethnicity, gender and class all combined to influence individual development, presenting such barriers to individuals as they try to mature into young adulthood while developing resiliency that enabled them to cope with life challenges and stresses. As Werner (1989) maintains, her studies demonstrate “an explanation of development that stresses the role that the social context plays ...