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Adolescence and Thriving

This entry describes the construct of thriving as an important and heretofore largely overlooked element in understanding positive adolescent development; posits several key conceptual and operational issues involved with the study of thriving; and describes initial results using one taxonomy of thriving, as well as the progress of a major new collaborative initiative designed to deepen knowledge of thriving and develop and broadly apply new thriving-measurement tools. The entry ends with suggestions for needed research in this area of adolescent development.

The Neglect of Thriving

The focus of most research on adolescence has for decades largely been to name problems or risk factors in young people's lives and attempt to identify methods for minimizing them (Benson, Leffert, Scales, & Blyth, 1998; Furstenburg, 2000). Indeed, a sweeping review of the early childhood literature concluded that there is much more known about deprivation than enrichment even in the early years of life. There is more focus on developmental dangers than on developmental opportunities and more attention paid to obstacles to well-being than to well-being itself (National Research Council and Institute of Medicine, 2000). Of course, a considerable amount of research also has been conducted over the last decade on individual, family, peer, and community factors that protect young people from risk. But for the most part, the work on protective factors such as a positive family life, responsible peer affiliations, and “conventional” values has as its fundamental purpose the unlocking of secrets to reducing the incidence of high-risk behaviors such as alcohol and other drug use. Even the vast amount of research that has been done on resilience can be viewed as being largely about how people attain adequate functioning in the face of serious developmental threats, not how they overcome those challenges to thrive, that is, to enjoy optimal development. The orientation of both the public and researchers toward young people is predominantly about naming and reducing negative behavior, or at best, how to promote merely adequate functioning or “getting by” among young people—not how to promote their developmental best.

Documenting the prevalence of risk behaviors among youth is necessary but insufficient in working toward a healthy community. A complementary approach to the catalog of risk behaviors is the study of thriving among adolescents.

Contextual Considerations in the Study of Thriving

Contemporary developmental theorists observe that promoting adolescent thriving entails understanding how positive bidirectional change occurs and may be promoted in the relation of persons to their contexts. The study of thriving may then best be thought of as understanding how young people become committed and able over time to contribute to “healthy family life and democratic community institutions while, at the same time, improving oneself in a manner that enables one's individual actions to be successful” (Lerner, Brentano, Dowling, & Anderson, 2002, p. 15). Lerner (2004) further argues that young people who are thriving develop an “orientation to transcend self-interest and place value on, and commitments to, actions supportive of a social system promoting equity, democracy, social justice, and personal freedoms” (chap. 5, p. 24). In this way, the relations between individual and context (community/society) as they change in mutually beneficial, healthy ways over time constitute the process of thriving.

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