Public Policy and Youth Development

Developmental Orientations to Youth Public Policy

National youth policy has primarily been driven by concern over adolescent problems and has steadfastly held to a developmental deficit orientation. Policy-makers have perennially been obsessed with escalating rates of developmental threats and health-compromising behavior among adolescents and consumed by expressions of youth psychopathology. The media's penchant for focusing on especially egregious actions undertaken by a small number of youth has regularly instilled negative images of youth as misguided and wayward at best, and as superpredators at worst. No wonder Burt, Zweig, and Roman (2002) argue that public policy is regularly “blind” to adolescents, except on those occasions when their actions make adults uneasy.

Despite this overriding deficit orientation, during the past two decades a growing body of research on the limited success of programs targeted at reducing or preventing risk behaviors and several highly influential Carnegie Corporation reports on the developmental needs of middle school and high school youth have fueled interest in an alternative tack of strength-based youth development approaches to promote health and well-being. Healthy development has been the subject of new lines of scientific inquiry and a novel topic of political conversations. The burgeoning science of applied human development provides an empirical foundation upon which a strength-based youth public policy can be built. A more common refrain in contemporary youth policy discussions is that a youth development perspective should guide investments. A strength-based youth policy would help codify the tenets of the youth development field, especially by moving thinking beyond negative outcomes and purely academic success to encompass both positive and nonacademic outcomes (Pittman, Diversi, & Ferber, 2002).

Cultural and Community Contexts of Youth Development

Evidence has also been compiled to show how significant technological, economic, and social changes transpiring over the past half century have dramatically altered youth connection to sources of support, empowerment, connection, modeling, and value transmission and modified the kinds of supports and opportunities that youth need to transition successfully from adolescence to adulthood. Pervasive age segregation is viewed as contributing to the deep disconnect adolescents have from long-term, sustained relationships with multiple adults. Increasing educational and financial obstacles to families securing and maintaining a middle-class existence are identified as having significant implications for the developmental pathways of more and more youth. Greater household income inequality, stemming from the interrelationship of deindustrialization and globalization and the resultant reduction in the number of secure manufacturing-based high-wage jobs for parents lacking college degrees, as well as the financial barriers many youth continue to face in obtaining a college diploma, has made economic disadvantage and downward mobility the demoralizing future guideposts for increasing numbers of youth and their families.

In addition to the challenges these societal circumstances generate, an overview of development in the United States points to a growing chaos in many traditional socializing systems (Bronfenbrenner & Morris, 1998). Others have argued that many youth experience a dissonance in core messages they receive about boundaries, expectations, and values, resulting in an inconsistent socialization.

Based on data compiled across America over the past decade, Search Institute has been able to document that youth do not commonly experience the fundamental elements of healthy development and that the human development infrastructure, if not outright [Page 902]chaotic, is particularly fragile and perhaps even ruptured in far too many communities (Benson, Scales, Leffert, & Roehlkepartain, 1999). Search Institute has conducted survey-based profiles of youth in approximately 2,000 suburban, rural, and urban communities based on its developmental asset framework. The 40 empirically based developmental assets youth need to be caring, healthy, and responsible are generally shown to be absent from the lives of most young people. Only a minority of American 6th–12th grade youth report access to such critical developmental resources as a caring neighborhood, intergenerational relationships, adult role models, a caring school climate, and creative (art/music/drama) activities. Subgroup analyses of student reports reveal that this profound lack of access to these developmental resources holds across gender, grade, parental education, and race/ethnicity. This is especially disturbing in light of ample data to show that these factors are understood to be predictive of significant adolescent health outcomes.

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