Our purpose in editing this volume is to give youth workers and others who wish to promote youth development in communities access to a rapidly growing body of knowledge. We hope the readers will be encouraged to build connections among settings or contexts for youth development to build a system within their communitites so that all youth may thrive. The aim of the book is to stimulate and inspire. It is not a “How-to” guide.

The term youth development and the ideas and practices associated with it have emerged from the field of youth work, but they have extended beyond practice to influence local, state, and national decision makers in the public and private sectors. Recently, youth development has become a focus for research. This sequence is important. The youth development movement began with professionals and volunteers engaged day-to-day with young people in their communities, in Boys and Girls Clubs, parks and recreation programs, faith groups, families, essentially in settings or contexts other than schools. Recognizing the primacy of practitioners in the field, our intention is to support them by providing a compact and readable set of essays summarizing current theory and research in the field, illustrated by examples of good practice.

Youth development is not unique in arising from practice. Practice seldom follows theory in lockstep. Rather, the two advance reciprocally as knowledge from each domain influences the other. We emphasize theory and research in this volume, with the goal of illuminating, extending, and challenging practice, not as something temporally prior and superior to practice that practitioners should regard as the received truth. We hope readers will not only use the theory and research and the case illustrations, learn from them, and appeal to them for external validation but also challenge, refine, correct, and enlarge them to continue the evolution of the field.

[Page x]The literature on youth development has grown rapidly, especially in the past decade. Enough written material can now be found both in print and on the Web to confuse any reader. One source of confusion is the different ways in which the term is used; another source of confusion is with the number of related terms—especially positive youth development and community youth development. In addition, writers emphasize different aspects of the topic, according to their varying perspectives and purposes: internal and external assets, resilience, prevention, and youth empowerment. But writers also disagree about some of the major tenets of the field, which is inevitable when a field encompasses so much.

The first chapter addresses the question of what we think youth development is and how it happens. Chapters in Part I describe how different contexts or settings contribute to youth development. They capture much of what we know about those contexts and how each may support youth development. These chapters are organized around people and activities that influence youth development. We emphasize contexts or settings because that reflects the way many people who work with youth identify themselves. The contexts within which development takes place are interrelated. Descriptions of exemplary programs in each chapter illustrate the kinds of issues people face in these environments as they implement the principles of youth development.

Some chapters refer to physical locations (schools, neighborhoods), others to moveable contexts (family, peer group), and some may overlap (peers congregate in schools and neighborhoods). One, the popular media culture, is a context only in an abstract way. But it is too pervasive and powerful an influence to neglect.

Although we hope each chapter will contain material that is valuable to all readers, we recognize that someone who is experienced in working with youth, for example, in a faith-based organization, might find little new in the few pages that can be devoted to that topic. Those pages may be more valuable for a reader familiar with community development who can gain a clearer understanding of how faith-based organizations might contribute to a youth initiative.

Our subtitle intentionally pays homage to Margaret Mead, whose book Coming of Age in Samoa (1928/1970) taught us that many of the youth issues we think of as being biologically programmed result instead from the interaction of biology with society: “Adolescence is not necessarily a time of stress and strain, but that cultural conditions make it so” (p. 170). Adolescence, in other words, is not inherently a tumultuous stage of life that youth and adults simply have to suffer through. This insight offers hope that we can make our communities more caring and supportive places [Page xi]where all youth can come of age as engaged and respected members, fully human though rapidly gaining competence. The ideas, findings, and examples contained in these pages can help us fulfill that hope.