When adults imagine what children will need for their best life, the first thoughts often go to outcomes: happiness, health, satisfying work, sound relationships and a sense of purpose. But, much as we would like to, we can’t hand these gifts to a child fully formed and tied up in a neat bow. They emerge imperfectly and over time, from capacities children develop in relationships with us and with other people—and in response to the worlds they inhabit.
In 2008, prevention researchers Nancy Guerra and Catherine Bradshaw organized a broad body of research around five core competencies associated with positive development: a positive sense of self, self-control, decision-making skills, a moral system of belief and prosocial connectedness. Their framework helped shift attention away from preventing everything that could go wrong and turned it toward building capacities that help young people navigate what does go wrong—and participate more fully in what goes right.
This series revisits their research to examine those five competencies in detail to ask how adults can help children develop them. The central insight is that children are not merely problems to manage or risks to contain. They are developing people with strengths that can be supported.
A Framework to Build On
The five competencies are easiest to discuss individually but it’s important we don’t assume they develop separately. A child who can pause when angry is using self-regulation, yet the pause may also protect a friendship, create room for a better decision and make it possible to act on a moral concern. A child who feels securely valued may be more willing to admit a mistake. Repairing that mistake can strengthen connection and reinforce a sense of being capable of change.
“Parental unconditional acceptance functions as a safety net that protects children’s sense of self-worth from fluctuations . . . allowing children to openly acknowledge their personal failures without the fear of losing parental love.”
Kitty Ka Yee Tsang and Shui-fong Lam, “Parental Unconditional Acceptance: An Antidote to Parental Conditional Regard” (2023)
Understanding the overlap in the framework allows us to build a more realistic picture of development. Capacities influence one another, and the same experience may exercise several at once. Joining a group project, caring for a younger sibling, negotiating a disagreement or recovering from a poor choice can call on identity, emotion, judgment, values and relationships together.
Nor should we imagine these competencies as milestones that children acquire once and file away in finished form. A child may regulate well at school and unravel at home, make thoughtful decisions when calm and impulsive ones with peers, or show compassion toward friends while excluding someone outside the group. Development will be uneven because demands, supports and emotional stakes change from one setting to another.
Five Lenses for Viewing the Developing Child
Self-esteem concerns the child’s developing answer to questions such as who am I, what am I able to do and do I matter? A sturdy sense of self doesn’t rest on feeling exceptional—though the term “self-esteem” has sometimes been misunderstood in that way. Rather, its healthy development rests on dependable belonging, realistic self-knowledge and the experience of becoming competent. It allows children to encounter failure without interpreting it as a verdict on their worth.
Self-regulation is the growing ability to manage attention, emotion and behavior in ways that serve a goal. It isn’t simply obedience or willpower. Regulation begins interpersonally—in the context of relationships that function somewhat like scaffolding does for a building under construction. Adults help children settle, name feelings, structure demands and practice responses until more of that work can be carried by the child internally. Even then, age, stress, fatigue and context affect what a child can access in the moment.
Decision-making develops as children connect information, emotion, experience and values. It might seem as though it should be enough to give them simple instructions on how to reach a “correct” answer, but our own life experience should tell us it isn’t. Good judgment requires opportunities to choose. Children need age-appropriate autonomy, room to make recoverable mistakes and help reflecting on what happened afterward. Regulation creates the pause in which judgment can operate; a secure sense of self makes it easier to learn from mistakes rather than defending them.
Prosocial skills help children form and sustain relationships, understand perspectives, cooperate, contribute and respond to another person’s needs. Empathy is part of this capacity, but prosocial development is larger than feeling another person’s emotion. It includes knowing how to help, managing one’s own distress, respecting boundaries and extending concern beyond familiar or favored people.
Moral development concerns how children reason about harm, fairness, rights, duties and the kind of person they want to be. Rules and adult guidance provide structure, but the longer-term aim is not rule-following for its own sake. It is increasing ownership of values and the ability to act on them when approval, convenience or group loyalty might point somewhere else.
The Strengths and Weaknesses of a Strengths Model
A strengths perspective goes beyond, “What is wrong with this child?” to ask a few more useful questions. It asks what capacities are already present, what conditions encourage their use, and what the next achievable step might be. That shift in framing can interrupt cycles in which adults notice children mainly when they fail. It also recognizes plasticity: current behavior is information about a child’s skills, stress and surroundings as they are now—it’s not an indication of their permanent identity.
Experience shapes not only what information enters the mind but also the mind’s ability to process that information. If experiences are interpersonally rich, predictable, and patterned, and if stressful experiences are not overwhelming, the brain becomes more connected, integrated, and functionally capable over time, increasing its adaptivity and resilience to future stress.
Pamela Cantor et al., “Malleability, Plasticity, and Individuality: How Children Learn and Develop in Context” (2018)
This doesn’t mean we ignore harmful behavior or replace limits with constant praise. Children need safety, standards, correction and accountability. But correction teaches more when it preserves the relationship and points toward a behavior the child can practice. The aim is not to manufacture a compliant performance in front of adults. It’s to help children gradually learn to take over the work of regulating, deciding, connecting and repairing.
The strengths model is especially useful when it keeps adults alert to small signs of growth. A child who cannot yet resolve a conflict may at least manage to use words instead of hitting. A teenager who rejects advice may still return later with a question. These are not finished competencies, but they are openings. Adults can acknowledge the movement, offer enough support for the next attempt and avoid turning every success into a test of character.
On the other hand, a list of personal strengths can become misleading if it treats outcomes as though they arise entirely from qualities inside the child. Development is always relational and contextual. A young person’s ability to concentrate, trust, plan or cooperate may be shaped by sleep, disability, trauma, discrimination, economic strain, neighborhood safety, school climate and whether dependable adults are available. Skills matter, but so do the conditions in which children are asked to use them.
The language of competence can also mask cultural assumptions. Families and communities may differ in how they balance autonomy with obligation to others, direct expression with restraint, individual achievement with collective wellbeing. Even apparently simple terms such as confidence, respect or helpfulness may look different across settings. A useful framework should help adults become curious about a child’s world, not give them a single cultural template against which to measure every child.
Strengths can also be context-dependent and double-edged. Persistence can become rigidity; sensitivity can become overwhelm; loyalty can protect a relationship or conceal harm. A child who appears quiet may be regulating thoughtfully, complying out of fear or conserving energy in an environment that feels unsafe. Labels alone tell us little. We need to ask what a behavior accomplishes for the child, what it costs them, and, if necessary, how we can help them move to a behavior that meets the required needs more effectively.
Fortunately, Guerra and Bradshaw’s framework allows for a wide developmental view. Children build capacities through ongoing exchanges with families, peers, schools, communities and institutions. Supporting a child may therefore mean teaching a skill, changing an environment, repairing a relationship, reducing an unreasonable demand—or doing several of these at once.
Helping Children Internalize Core Capacities
If we think about how children learn to walk, the developmental process makes good sense. At first, adults provide extensive support. As balance and skill increase, they step back without disappearing. The same rhythm applies to emotional and social learning: co-regulation before self-regulation, shared decisions before independent ones, guided repair before self-directed accountability.
Warmth and structure work together to bring about personal growth. Children are more open to guidance when they feel secure, clear limits give them predictability, and manageable choices support their sense of agency and its further development. Specific feedback shows what they did and why it mattered under the circumstance, and practice makes a skill more habitual so it can be instinctive under pressure.
It’s important to keep in mind that, despite their eminence in a child’s life, parents don’t control every influence, and no technique guarantees a particular outcome. Peers, temperament, neurodevelopment, culture, opportunity and chance all contribute to how someone’s skills grow. The task is not to engineer a flawless child. It’s to build a relationship and environment in which growth is possible, setbacks are taken as valuable information and children can increasingly participate in their own development.
These competencies become even more important when life becomes difficult. A young person facing pressure to exclude a classmate needs enough inner security to risk disapproval, enough regulation to tolerate discomfort, enough judgment to anticipate consequences, enough social awareness to recognize another person’s position and enough moral conviction to act. Weakness in one area won’t doom their response, but strength across the network increases the likelihood they’ll manage a positive outcome.
In taking a bird’s-eye view, the five competencies aren’t separate virtues adults can program and install in their children, nor should they be viewed as a scorecard for judging parenting success. They are overlapping, continuously developing capacities—supported by relationships and constrained or enlarged by context. Their purpose isn’t to engineer perfect behavior. It’s to supply children with the tools they need to grow into competent adults who are able to meet their world with agency, connection, reflection and care.
Key References
Urie Bronfenbrenner and Pamela A. Morris, “The Bioecological Model of Human Development,” Handbook of Child Psychology, Volume 1: Theoretical Models of Human Development (2006).
Pamela Cantor et al., “Malleability, Plasticity, and Individuality: How Children Learn and Develop in Context,” Applied Developmental Science (2019).
Jacquelynne Eccles and Jennifer Appleton Gootman, eds., Community Programs to Promote Youth Development (2002).
Nancy G. Guerra and Catherine P. Bradshaw, “Linking the Prevention of Problem Behaviors and Positive Youth Development: Core Competencies for Positive Youth Development and Risk Prevention,” New Directions for Child and Adolescent Development (2008).
Richard M. Lerner et al., “Positive Youth Development and Relational-Developmental-Systems,” Handbook of Child Psychology and Developmental Science, Volume 1: Theory and Method (2015).
Ann S. Masten, Ordinary Magic: Resilience in Development (2014).
David Osher et al., “Drivers of Human Development: How Relationships and Context Shape Learning and Development,” Applied Developmental Science (2020).
Kitty Ka Yee Tsang and Shui-fong Lam, “Parental Unconditional Acceptance: An Antidote to Parental Conditional Regard,” Social Development (2023)
