Search Institutes Positive Youth Development

emerged as an approach among practitioners working with youth, when they saw the benefits of using strength-based models with children and adolescents. As often happens, this work in the practitioner arena proceeded with little attention from the academic world until relatively recently. The long history of the application of developmental psychology and sociology had been pervaded by a focus almost exclusively on the negative: disadvantaged family backgrounds, risky behaviors, the effects of poverty, rapid social change, and substance use. “Normal” development was thought not to provide much interest or scope for study, compared with development that was maladjusted or downright aberrant. The pendulum swing away from abnormal development began with the study of resilience—the amazing ability of some adolescents to succeed, even thrive, despite challenges, obstacles, and deficits that led many of their peers to make disastrous choices. Out of the critiques of deficit models and the calls for “something better” that arose from practitioners dissatisfied with “merely” reducing risky behaviors came what we now call positive youth development.2 It is the focus on young people’s strengths, skills, and possibilities. Indeed, William Damon of Stanford University argues that positive youth development represents a sea change in psychological theory and research, with observable consequences for a variety of fields, including education and social policy.3 Damon suggests that PYD takes a strength-based approach to defining and understanding how children influence and are influenced by their contexts over time; it holds up the centrality of community as an incubator of positive development as well as a multifaceted setting in which young people can exercise agency and inform the settings, places, people, and policies that in turn affect their development. Finally, in its efforts to identify the positive attitudes and competencies that energize healthy developmental trajectories, the field is INSIGHTS EVIDENCE