Zdrowie psychiczne dzieci i młodzieży. Podatnośc czynnika ryzyka, odporność

The paper concerns on the child’s and adolescent’s needs to empower his/her inner resources which build one’s stress protection. The review of four psychological conceptions shows importance of individual abilities in problem solving situations. The role of temporal psychic destabilization in the human life is analyzed in the approaches of E. Erikson, K. Dąbrowski, A. Antonovsky, N. Garmezy, E. Werner and G. Richardson. The author describes shortly such concepts as stress vulnerability and resilience, risk factors and protection factors in the field of mental health. The question of mental health is especially important in the contemporary life, that is a great challenge for children’s and youth’s coping abilities in face of stress. Many mental health promotion programs base on empowering of life skills and learning of new, effective stress coping strategies. The positive prophylactics underlines promotion of inner resources development instead of dangerous activities inhibition only. The basic presumption of this positive way of thinking assumes, that early achieved problem and conflict solving abilities build a good preparation to stress coping in the adolescence and adult life.