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Physical & psychological safety Appropriate structure Supportive relationships Opportunities to belong Positive social norms Support for efficacy & mattering Opportunities for skill-building Integration of family, school & community efforts
Making Mandates Out of What We Know about Children & Youth
Young people need & deserve supports & opportunities throughout their waking hours.
Young people deserve early & sustained investments throughout at least the first two decades of life.
Young people need investments & involvement to help them achieve a broad range of positive outcomes from academic to physical to civic. (This requires a steady focus on protection, prevention, preparation & participation within each area.)
It is a truism that it takes a village to raise a child. But in the U.S., the villagers rarely come together
to take stock of their efforts.
When General Powell and America’s Promise challenged the country to provide every young person with five fundamental resources, communities had no idea how many resources their young people commonly had. There are no mechanisms to track the quality or even quantity of support young people receive across systems. All children and youth are worse off because of this, but it is especially problematic that the supports offered to low-income teens just don’t add up to what they should.
A false sense of accomplishment • Busyness is not the same as effectiveness. There are many, many policies,
programs and initiatives addressing youth problems &, to a lesser extent, supporting preparation & participation. But these efforts are not evenly distributed within & across sub-populations.
Unchecked support for narrow interests • Our chronic inability to ask what all of our efforts add up to suggests that there are
reasons why no one really wants to know. Need arguments can be made for almost any program or policy if they are made in a vacuum.
Unleveraged resources in scarce times • Our growing inability to help all young people succeed, despite rhetoric to the
contrary, suggests that communities & states have no choice but to call the question:
Are we doing the best that we can by all of our youth?
There has been too much talk & not enough action in the youth fields.
It is time to decide not only that every child counts & every dollar counts but that every opinion, every meeting, every report, every evaluation counts.
It is time to bring discipline & direction to meandering discussions about how to support young people’s growth & development.
This doesn’t necessary mean more planning, but it does mean more precision.
Opportunities to Belong Exclusion, marginalization, intergroup conflict Opportunities for meaningful inclusion, regardless of one’s gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or disabilities; social inclusion, social engagement and integration; opportunities for socio-cultural identity formation; support for cultural and bicultural competence.
Positive Social Norms Normless, anomie, laissez-faire practices, antisocial and amoral norms, norms that encourage violence, reckless behavior consumerism, poor health practices; conformity
Rules of behavior, expectations, injunctions, ways of doing things, values and morals, obligations for service
Support for Efficacy and Mattering
Unchallenging, overcontrolling, disempowering, disabling. Practices that undermine includes motivation and desire to learn, such a excessive focus on current relative performance level rather than improvement
Youth-based, empowerment practices that support autonomy, making a real difference in one’s community, and being taken seriously. Practice that is enabling, responsibility granting, meaningful challenges. Practice that focus on improvement rather than on relative current levels
Opportunities for Skill Building
Practice that promotes bad physical habits and habits of mind; practice that undermines school and learning.
Opportunities to learn physical, intellectual, psychological, emotional, and social skills; exposure to intentional learning experiences; opportunities to learn cultural.
Integration of Family, School, and Community Efforts
Discordance, lack of communication, conflict Concordance, coordination, and synergy among family, school, and community
Check the Octane: Do the Places Where Young People Spend their Time Really Support Their Growth? Quality Counts
Successful children remind us that children grow up in multiple contexts – in families, schools, peer groups, baseball teams, religious organizations… – and each context is a potential source of protective factors as well as risks…
Lessons from Resiliency Research
– Masten and Coatsworth, The Development of Competence in Favorable and Unfavorable
– Masten and Coatsworth, The Development of Competence in Favorable and Unfavorable
Environments…, 1998
Development is biased toward competence, but there is no such thing as an invulnerable child. If we allow the prevalence of known risk factors for development to rise while resources for children fall, we can expect the competence of individual children and the human capital of the nation to suffer.