Developmental Assets and Developmental Relationships

This entry describes the positive youth development theoretical and research frameworks of developmental assets and developmental relationships. The field of practice and research known as positive youth development is a relatively recent approach for understanding how youth successfully develop. It emerged over the last 30 years and has become a vital force in shaping the study of adolescence. Several features make positive youth development distinctive from the approaches that came before (a) a focus on young people’s strengths and not their deficits; (b) an emphasis on what we want to promote in, with, and for young people, not only on what we want to prevent; (c) an ecological perspective that considers not only what is going on inside young people but how young people’s relations ...