Positive Youth Development, a Developmental Systems View

In these early years of the 21st century, a new vision and vocabulary for discussing America's young people has emerged. Propelled by the increasingly more collaborative contributions of scholars (e.g., Damon & Gregory, 2003), practitioners (e.g., Pittman, Irby, & Ferber, 2001), and policymakers (e.g., Gore & Gore, 2002), youth are viewed as resources to be developed. The new vocabulary emphasizes the strengths present within all young people and involves concepts such as developmental assets (Benson, 2003), positive youth development (Benson, 1990), moral development (Damon, 1998), civic engagement (e.g., Flanagan & Faison, 2001), well-being (Bornstein, Davidson, Keyes, Moore, & The Center for Child Well-Being, 2003), and thriving (Scales, Benson, Leffert, & Blyth, 2000). All concepts are predicated on the ideas that every young person has the potential for successful, healthy development and that all youth possess the capacity for positive development.

This vision for and vocabulary about youth have evolved over the course of a scientifically arduous path (Lerner, Dowling, & Anderson, 2003). Complicating any new conceptualization of the character of youth as resources for the positive development of self, families, and communities was an antithetical theoretical approach to the nature and development of young people, one characterized by a deficit view of youth that conceptualizes their behaviors as deviations from normative development (see Hall, 1904). Understanding such deviations was not seen as being of direct relevance to scholarship aimed at discovering the principles of basic developmental processes. Accordingly, the characteristics of youth were regarded as issues of “only” applied concern—and thus of secondary scientific interest. Not only did this model separate basic science from application, but it also disembedded the adolescent from the study of normal or healthy development. In short, the deficit view of youth as problems to be managed split the study of young people from the study of health and positive development (Lerner et al., 2003). However, the integration of person and context, of basic and applied scholarship, and of young people with the potential for positive development were legitimated by the relational models of development that emerged as cutting-edge scholarship by the end of the 20th century (Damon, 1998).

The forefront of contemporary developmental theory and research is associated with ideas stressing that systemic relations between individuals and contexts provide the bases of human behavior and developmental change (e.g., Damon, 1998; Lerner, 2002; Overton, 1998). Within the context of such theories, changes across the life span are seen as propelled by the dynamic relations between individuals and the multiple levels of the ecology of human development, all changing interdependently across time (Lerner, 2002).

Temporal embeddedness means that there always exists across life the potential for change in person-context relations. There are two important concepts associated with this optimistic view of the potential to enhance human life: Relative plasticity and developmental regulation.

Change in person-context relations is not limitless. Interlevel relations within the system both facilitate and constrain opportunities for change. As a consequence, contemporary developmental systems theories stress that relative plasticity—the potential for systematic change in structure and/or function—exists across life, although the magnitude of this plasticity may vary across ontogeny (Baltes, Lindenberger, & Staudinger, 1998; Lerner, 2002). The presence of relative plasticity legitimates an optimistic and proactive search for characteristics of individuals and their ecologies that, together, can be arrayed to promote positive developmental change (Lerner, 2002). The developmental systems stress on relative plasticity provides a foundation for an applied developmental science aimed at enhancing human development through strengthening the interrelations between an individual and his or her context that maintain and perpetuate healthy, positive functioning for all facets of the relationship. From this perspective, healthy development involves positive changes in the relation between a developing person who is committed and able to contribute positively to self, family, and community and a community supporting the development of such citizens.

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