Career Development and Career Design

2016

The positive youth development (PYD) perspective is a strength-based conception of adolescence. Derived from developmental systems theory, the perspective stressed that PYD emerges when the potential plasticity of human development is aligned with devel-opmental assets. The research reported in this special issue, which is derived from col-laborations among multiple university and community-based laboratories, reflects and extends past theory and research by documenting empirically (a) the usefulness of apply-ing this strength-based view of adolescent development within diverse youth and commu-nities; (b) the adequacy of conceptualizing PYD through Five Cs (competence, confi-dence, connection, character, and caring); (c) the individual and ecological developmental assets associated with PYD; and (d) implications for community programs and social policies pertinent to youth.

2012

Journal of Adolescent Research, 2008

Treating and Preventing Adolescent Mental Health Disorders, 2005

This contribution addresses positive youth development with respect to mental illness and mental health.We discuss positive characteristics of youth and their settings and how these are related to thriving.We summarize what is known about programs and institutions that promote positive development. In conclusion, we take stock of what we know and what we do not know.

Journal of Youth and Adolescence, 2014

The process of positive development for adolescents includes struggling to address a wide variety of complex, often unstated bio-psycho-social-cultural challenges. These include formulating workable values, learning self-regulation, preparation for adult work roles-and innumerable other untidy puzzles. Variable-based research can only scratch the surface of how youth go about these processes; nonetheless, systematic longitudinal research like this can provide valuable information about developmental pathways and directions of change. Highlights from these papers include the finding that older youth report more goals aimed at meaningful connection with others and contributing to society; yet also that moral character did not differ by age. The papers suggest that relationships adults, hope, school engagement, participation in out-of-school programs, and intentional self-regulation can serve as mediators of positive development. Yet, a striking finding was that comparatively few youth in the study manifest a pattern of change marked by the coupling of increases in positive youth development and decreases in risk/problem behavior. We believe there is much beneath the surface to be uncovered.

The Annals of the American Academy of Political …, 2004

This article explores the recent approach to youth research and practice that has been called positive youth development. The author makes the case that the approach grew out of dissatisfaction with a predominant view that underestimated the true capacities of young people by focusing on their deficits rather than their developmental potentials. The article examines three areas of research that have been transformed by the positive youth approach: the nature of the child; the interaction between the child and the community; and moral growth. It concludes with the point that positive youth development does not simply mean an examination of anything that appears to be beneficial for young people. Rather, it is an approach with strong defining assumptions about what is important to look at if we are to accurately capture the full potential of all young people to learn and thrive in the diverse settings where they live.

Positive Youth Development (PYD) is a framework used to design and guide programs and services for children and youth. PYD emphasizes the relationship between young people's strengths and resources and their capacity to live healthy and productive lives. The underlying tenets of PYD suggest that healthy child and youth development is characterized by a sense of responsibility, connectedness, and positive values. Put into practice, key PYD strategies include identifying youth strengths, engaging and motivating young people to support positive growth through these strengths, working with youth as collaborators, and harnessing resources that exist in a young person's environment. PYD advocates assert that common risk-oriented prevention and intervention frameworks fail to consider the idea that preventing a problem from occurring does not guarantee that youth are developing and growing in a healthy manner. Thus, from a PYD perspective healthy development is not simply the absence of problem behavior but it also includes the cultivation of resources and strengths within a child and her or his particular context. Ultimately, PYD suggests that young people who have mutually beneficial relationships with other people and institutions will enter adulthood as positive and successful contributors. In this sense, individuals and their respective social ecologies-peers, schools, families, and communities-are active contributors to the developmental process and promotion of well-being. Today, on-the-ground proponents of PYD are social workers and other individuals who advocate for policy change and funding for interventions and community-based services aimed at promoting healthy youth development. The grassroots efforts of advocates and interdisciplinary research efforts of scholars have also contributed greatly to a recent proliferation in PYD programs for children and youth. The PYD model has much to offer practitioners, community and program planners, and administrators seeking to develop or improve interventions and program services for children and youth. The positive focus on healthy child and adolescent development that the framework embodies has stimulated a rapid increase in PYD programs since the turn of the 21st century. More important, positive outcomes garnered from participants of PYD programs have now begun to support the utility of the model in real-world contexts. Yet as the field has grown, so have challenges in characterizing what constitutes a PYD program, organization, policy, or set of practices.

SAGE Publications Ltd eBooks, 2007

The "positive youth development" (PYD) perspective is an orientation to young people that has arisen because of interest among developmental scientists in using developmental systems, or dynamic, models of human behaviour and development for understanding (1) the plasticity of human development and (2) the importance of relations between individuals and their real-world ecological settings as bases of variation in the course of human development (Lerner, 2005). The PYD perspective has arisen as well through the development and, in some cases, the evaluation of interventions designed and delivered within community-based, youth serving programs that have worked to counter what have been seen as steady states across the past five to six decades of substantial incidences of risk behaviours among adolescents. This book discusses several of the key models of PYD framing the literature of developmental science. In addition, we illustrate the use of the PYD perspective in understanding adolescent development in relation to the multiple contexts of youth development and in promoting PYD through community-based interventions or social policy. In turn, this chapter rationalizes and explains the foci of this book by discussing the origins and the features of the PYD perspective.

2006

Council and by the William T. Grant Foundation. Jacqueline V. Lerner and Elise Christiansen are affiliated with Boston College. Alexander von Eye is affiliated with Michigan State University. All other authors are affiliated with Tufts University. Portions of the theory of positive youth development presented in this chapter have been derived from Lerner (2004). The data presented in this chapter were reported originally in Lerner, et al. (2005). How do we know if adolescents are doing well in life? What vocabulary do researchers, parents, teachers, policy makers, and often young people themselves, use to describe a young person who is showing successful development? All too often in the United States and internationally, we discuss positive development in regard to the absence of negative or undesirable behaviors. Typically, such descriptions are predicated on the assumption that children are "broken" or in danger of becoming broken (Benson, 2003), and thus that young people are "problems to be managed" (Roth, Brooks-Gunn, Murray, & Foster, 1998). As such, when we describe a successful young person we speak about a youth whose problems have been managed or are, at best, absent. We might say, then, that a youth who is manifesting behavior indicative of positive development is someone who is not taking drugs or using alcohol, is not engaging in unsafe sex, and is not participating in crime or violence. Benson (2003) believes that the focus on problems in Americans' discussions of youth, and the use in the United States of a vocabulary that stresses the risks and dangers of young people, occurs because we have "a culture dominated by deficit and risk thinking, by pathology and its symptoms" (p. 25) and he points out that "Intertwined with this social phenomenon is the contemporary dominance of what is often called the deficit-reduction paradigm. In this paradigm, research and practice are steered to naming, counting, and reducing the incidence of environmental risks (e.g., family violence, poverty, family disintegration) and healthcompromising behaviors (e.g., substance use, adolescent pregnancy, interpersonal violence, school dropout)" (p. 24). The deficit model of youth that shapes our vocabulary about the behaviors prototypic of young people results, then, in an orientation in America to discuss positive youth development as the absence of negative behaviors (Pittman & Fleming, 1991)

Applied Developmental Science, 2003

Positive youth development is conceptualized within a developmental systems theoretical model. The role of thriving processes and civic engagement in positive youth development is discussed.