ABSTRACT
Building up a particular set of skills in children and young people to help them cope in everyday life is our task in this chapter. We start with the premise that acquiring these skills will not necessarily transform a child in any fundamental way although with a combination of luck, developmental growth, time and effort on the part of young people, carers, parents and workers this may well come eventually. We should also remind ourselves of the lesson from complexity theory. Small interventions can have big effects. And as others have shown, including Quinton and Rutter in their observations of disadvantaged children's positive experiences of school, this can be particularly the case in situations where children do not have much of a good thing going for them (1988: 98).
