Contact Name
Barbara Dietsch
562-799-5126
bdietsc@WestEd.org

Teenage pregnancy should not be considered in isolation from other risk behaviors among youth or as independent of structural problems in the family (e.g., increases in single parenthood and in unsupervised time for youth) and in society, e.g., involving poverty. Teenage pregnancy is often coupled with drug and alcohol use and abuse, school underachievement, failure, dropout, delinquency and (often violent) crime. Joy Dryfoos has estimated that 50% of American youth engage in two or more of these sets of behaviors and that 10% engage in all four. Moreover, since the 1980s a fifth of our nation’s children and adolescents have been embedded in poverty. Given the unprecedented scope and interrelation of the contemporary challenges to the healthy development of our nation’s children and adolescents, new efforts must be devised, evaluated and, if effective, sustained.

The initiation, evaluation, scale, and sustainability of such programs require sustained commitments of economic and behavioral resources. Accordingly, there is a need to engage policy and to leverage policy makers to take actions in support of such program efforts. This is not an easy task, perhaps especially at this time in the United States.

America is the only western nation without a national youth policy, and is one of only two nations that have not endorsed the United Nations’ declaration on the rights of children. In this policy context, then, the contemporary problems besetting young people will require innovation efforts to convince local, state, and federal elected officials to develop policies mandating practices that sustain existing effective youth-serving programs and supporting the development and evaluation of new innovative programs. Such innovation must involve more than problem prevention. It must involve as well the promotion of positive youth development.

Preventing disease does not constitute the provision of health. Preventing the actualization of youth risk behaviors, and the diminution of the quality of life such behaviors entail for society when large proportions of cohorts of youth engage in them, is not the same as taking actions to promote positive youth development. Providing the means to make youth physically healthy and to promote their positive psychological and social development involves the engagement of the entire ecology of human development. That is, the strengths, capacities–or assets–of all levels of the developmental system–individuals, families, schools, the media, governmental organizations, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), businesses and industry, and the faith community–must be integrated to promote positive youth development.

What is the cost to society of failing to integratively engage the assets of the developmental system? What is lost if society foregoes a commitment to promoting the positive development of its cohorts of youth? Civil society, to the extent it exists, will be eroded, if not irreparably compromised and, to the degree it is an objective of national development, will be impossible to attain.

Accordingly, based on current knowledge about the individual and ecological bases involved in the promotion of positive youth development, public policies should be aimed at insuring that families have the capacity to provide for children: boundaries and expectations; fulfillment of physiological and safety needs; a climate of love and caring; the inculcation of self esteem; the encouragement for growth; positive values; and positive links to the community.

The programs that derive from these policies should insure that the resources that families need to nurture and socialize children in this manner are available. These resources would give children: a healthy start; a safe environment; caring and reliably available adults; an education resulting in marketable skills; and opportunities to "give back" to their communities by volunteering and service.

If programs are effective in delivering such resources, several positive developmental outcomes will accrue among children. These outcomes can be summarized by "five Cs": Competence, Connection, Character, Confidence, and Caring (or Compassion). These five attributes represent five clusters of individual attributes–for example, intellectual ability and social and behavioral skills; positive bonds with people and institutions; integrity and moral centerdness; positive self-regard, a sense of self-efficacy, and courage; and humane values, empathy, and a sense of social justice, respectively.

When these five sets of outcomes are developed in youth, civil society is enhanced through the intergenerational effects these youth initiate in regard to the rearing of subsequent generations of citizens, that is, through the parenting of their children. The enhancement of civil society feeds back to influence the family and the young people reared within it. As young people grow up in families providing the orientation to self and society, they will take on the behaviors that the policies and associated programs were designed to inculcate. Thus, civil society will grow through facilitating the nurturing and socialization function of families.

To build a strong and socially just nation will require citizens to continuously educate themselves about the best means available to promote enhanced healthy lives among all youth and families, but especially those whose potentials for positive contributions to our nation are most in danger of being wasted. The collaborative expertise of all stakeholders in the lives of our nation’s youth–including America’s institutions of higher education–may contribute to this effort, especially if all partners take steps to enhance the capacities and strengths of the communities they serve. Policies promoting such coalitions could become an integral component of a national youth development policy aimed at creating caring communities having the capacity to nurture the healthy development of our children and families.

Clearly, the key "fuel" to enable such a model for a national youth and family policy to work is one that builds on the existing assets of communities. According to Search Institute of Minneapolis, Minnesota, these assets involve "external" (community- and family-based) assets, such as social support, empowerment activities, boundary and expectation setting, and facilitation of the constructive use of time by youth; and "internal" (inculcated, youth-based) assets, such as a commitment to learning, positive values, social competencies, and positive identity.

These assets are the current "inventory" of building blocks for civil society in America. Through use of these assets we may create for the next millennium a socially just and civil society populated by healthy and productive children and adolescents.