Youth, Volume 4, Issue 2 (June 2024) – 12 articles

In the late 1970s, adolescents in East Harlem, New York, participated in a program called the Youth Action Program where they worked collectively to address systemic issues causing inequities in their communities (e.g., inequities in housing and education). In the current study, we integrate the sociopolitical development framework with life-course health development to explore how participation in the program shaped adolescents’ skills and capacities for social transformation in ways that were health-promotive and informative for life trajectories. Data included retrospective interviews and member-checking focus group data of 10 former Youth Action Program members (current M_age = 63; 45% female; 55% male) from predominantly Black and Latinx backgrounds. We used reflexive thematic analysis and adopted a case study approach to highlight how participants’ adolescent experiences of sociopolitical development and resistance against oppressive circumstances propelled healthy life-course development. Specifically, participants were able to establish healthy lives through four health-promotive sociopolitical developmental processes: questioning the system not the self; carving out alternative spaces and pathways; building agency in a dehumanizing society; and finding purpose through committing to social change. Our study suggests that contemporary youth organizing programs can incorporate sustaining practices including the careful vetting and training of adult staff, pursuing tangible opportunities to create change, and embedding youth voice and leadership into programmatic structures to encourage healthy development via sociopolitical development. Full article

Despite a rhetorical turn towards prevention in homelessness policy and research, the work of youth homelessness prevention continues to be frustrated by persistent structural barriers. In this article, we examine how youth homelessness prevention is being implemented in the province of Ontario, with a focus on targeted provincial support programs and local shelter diversion practices. Drawing on interviews with workers in the homeless-serving sector, we describe the implementation of these initiatives and identify points of frustration and potential that workers encounter as they try to prevent experiences of homelessness for youth. We contend that these points of frustration illuminate persistent structural barriers that continue to forestall the work of youth homelessness prevention. Meanwhile, points of potential demonstrate the importance of empowering workers to creatively adapt and offer responsive services. Taken together, these signal the critical importance of two aspects of contemporary homelessness prevention typologies—primordial prevention and empowerment. We end by offering aspirations for action, a political reframing of the policy recommendations sections more typical of social science research articles. We do so to affirm our commitment to advancing the work of structural transformation that is required to achieve the right to housing for all, including youth. Full article

The current study aims to explore the relevance of ‘time spent with parents’ for different risk behaviors (i.e., alcohol use, smoking, gambling and problematic social media use), peer factors (i.e., time spent with peers, peer pressure and peer support) and parenting behaviors (i.e., control, relatedness and family support). A cross-sectional design was employed, including 2165 adolescents aged from 12 to 18 years (Mage = 14.7, SD = 1.33; 52% girls; 30% in pre-vocational education). Independent sample t-tests were performed to compare different contrasting groups (≤1 h vs. >1 h; ≤2 h vs. >2 h; ≤3 h and >3 h) for relevant outcomes. Results. Adolescents spending on average >1 h per day with their parents in joint activities reported lower levels of risk behavior, less peer pressure, more peer support and more parental control, relatedness and family support. At the same time, this does not seem to come at the expense of spending time with peers, as adolescents spending 1 h or more with their parents did not spend less time with their peers. All the findings point at the relevance of parents spending time and undertaking joint activities with their adolescent children. Full article

The objectives of the present study were to describe civic attitudes and behaviors among Latinx child farmworkers in North Carolina, examine civic outcomes across relevant demographic characteristics, and discuss the implications for research on sociopolitical development among Latinx child farmworkers and for developmental theory. Descriptive statistics (count, percent, or mean, standard deviation as appropriate) were calculated for demographic and civic variables. Associations between the demographic variables and the four civic summary variables were calculated using Generalized Linear Models, the Kruskal–Wallis test, t-tests, or Chi-Square tests. Latinx child farmworkers in North Carolina (N = 169; ages 11–19, M_age = 15.8, 62.7% boys) endorsed relatively high levels of beliefs that society is fair and connections/efficacy in their communities. They reported relatively low involvement in volunteering and political activity. Future work should examine how the daily lives and experiences of child farmworkers inform their developing ideas about civic life in the US and their behavioral participation as they mature. Full article

The meaning of care in residential child care is under-developed. It can often be represented through its absence, seen as offering at best basic physical tending but lacking emotional connection or warmth. At worst, residential care settings said to be institutionally abusive can be characterised as being antithetical to what we might imagine care should be. Residential schools and especially those run by religious orders attract particular opprobrium in this regard. In this article, I adopt a broadly autoethnographic approach to reflect on how boys (now men in their late 40s and early 50s) brought up in the 1980s in a Scottish residential school recall being cared for. The article uses Axel Honneth’s theory of recognition and its three pillars of love, rights and solidarity to group themes from how former pupils speak about their experiences of care. These accounts challenge the received narrative of such settings failing to offer care. The discussion reflects some ideas around care and about how we understand public care historically. Full article

Parents/caregivers remain important in the lives of emerging adults in the modern era and understanding the ways in which parents of emerging adults balance responsiveness, demandingness, and autonomy support can help inform evidence-based recommendations around developmentally appropriate protective parenting. The present study identified four “parenting styles” in emerging adulthood in a sample of 680 4-year university and community college students (M = 19.0, ranging from 18 to 25; 70.7% female, 22.6% male) who reported on their primary parent/caregiver’s parenting behaviors. These parenting styles largely overlapped with traditional conceptualizations of parenting styles (two authoritarian profiles, a potentially indulgent profile, and a profile characterized by the average levels of all parenting behaviors measured, which may reflect the modern authoritative parenting style of emerging adults). No hypothesized overparenting profile emerged. The potentially indulgent profile saw the lowest levels of depression, mood, and anxiety symptoms, whereas the potentially indulgent and authoritative profiles saw the most positive wellbeing outcomes. The findings underscore the way in which responsiveness and autonomy support in emerging adulthood appear developmentally appropriate and adaptive, and how helicopter parenting does not appear to be as important as other aspects of parent–emerging adult relationships. Full article

This article reviews the impacts of the UK Conservative Party’s government policies on ‘open access youth work’ since 2010, giving particular attention to the period since 2018 and to impacts in England. After clarifying the practice’s distinctive features, it outlines the ‘austerity’ demolition of its local provision and—amid continuing wider financial pressures—changes in the role and contributions of the voluntary youth sector. It lists a range of ‘gesture’ funds for financing responses to young people’s needs and interests as the government has defined them and uses the Youth Investment Fund (YIF) as a case study of how this money has been made available and allocated. Initiatives taken by the Department of Digital, Media, Culture and Sport (DCMS) are then examined: its Youth Review, National Youth Guarantee, review of the statutory guidance to local authorities, and support for ‘youth volunteering’. Two key developments are then considered that, by early 2024, were diverting and inhibiting an even partial sustained reinstatement of the lost open access youth work facilities. One, at the policy level, is the redefinition of ‘youth work’ by governments and by some within the youth work sector itself as a wide range of out-of-school practices with young people; the other, at the point of delivery, is the on-going difficulties in recruiting youth workers, especially those with direct practice experience. Finally, two possible tentative suggestions for some reinstatement of open access youth work provisions are then discussed. Full article

Self-regulation has been shown to play a protective role against youth substance abuse, but less is known about its influence on bullying behavior. In the present study, we examined several forms of bullying (physical, social, cyber, and all forms combined) and roles (bullies, victims, and bully-victims). Students (N = 1977, ages 11 to 13) from 27 middle schools throughout the United States (US) completed an online self-reported assessment of bullying and its hypothesized etiologic determinants. Across the outcomes, analyses revealed that social bullying was most prevalent, followed by physical bullying and cyberbullying. For bullying roles, almost two-thirds of students reported bullying victimization, nearly one-quarter reported bullying perpetration, and one in five students reported both. Of those reporting perpetration, 9 of 10 reported being victimized. Multivariate logistic regression models were used to examine the associations between self-regulation, bystander intervention skills, and bullying. For all forms of bullying combined, self-regulation was protective against bullying perpetration (OR 0.51, 95% CI: 0.42, 0.63) and perpetration/victimization (OR 0.55, 95% CI: 0.44, 0.68), while bystander intervention skills were not protective. Similar patterns emerged for physical, social, and cyberbullying. Collectively, these findings indicate that building self-regulation skills may be a critical component of interventions aimed at preventing bullying among school-aged youth. Full article

As Black and Latina adolescent girls experience race and gender discrimination, they may turn to their families to explore their beliefs about and responses to systemic injustice and oppression. Familial racial socialization is a likely entry point for critical action (like community activism), linking ethnic–racial identity and critical consciousness in youth development. We used hierarchical linear regression to investigate whether familial racial socialization moderated the relationship between experiences of gendered racism and community activism. We analyzed survey data for 315 Black (n = 158) and Latina/Afro-Latina (n = 157) girls (n = 282) and gender expansive youth (age 13–17) from the southern United States. We found that girls who received more familial socialization and were more frequently stereotyped as being angry participated in more low-risk and formal political activism. Also, Black and Latina girls who were more frequently stereotyped as angry and received more messages about racism from their families engaged in more high-risk activism, while girls who were more frequently perceived as angry and received less racial socialization engaged in less high-risk activism. We discuss the implications of our results for families, educators, and scholars who support Black and Latina girls’ sociopolitical development. Full article

This study examined the risk of low energy availability (LEA) and eating disorders among elite adolescent female athletes from a mixed-sport cohort and ballet dancers in Singapore, where the accelerated biological needs of adolescent growth and maturation overlap with the pursuit of sport/ballet excellence and high-stakes academic testing. All of these are competing demands for adequate fuelling and seeking timely treatment, which consequently affect the risk of LEA. Eighty-nine participants (41 athletes, 48 dancers; age 16.00 [3.00] years old) were screened for the risk of LEA and eating disorders using the Low Energy Availability in Females Questionnaire (LEAF-Q) and Brief Eating Disorder in Athletes Questionnaire (BEDA-Q), respectively. The main effects of athlete/ballet status and age (≤15 years old versus 15.1 years–18 years old) on LEAF-Q and BEDA-Q scores was be determined via Spearman’s correlation coefficient and linear regression analyses. The Mann–Whitney U test and Fisher’s exact test were used to compare the groups for the risk of LEA and ED. We observed that adolescent athletes and ballet dancers had a similar prevalence of being at risk of LEA (61.98% versus 54.17%, respectively, p = 0.529), with the risk of eating disorders absent in most of them. It appeared that the risk of LEA is likely of an unintentional nature in this study as the risk of ED was absent in 90.2% of the adolescent athletes/ballet dancers that were at risk of LEA. The age of the participants was significantly correlated with the risk of LEA, while the number of training hours was negatively correlated with the same factor. Age was also found to be negatively correlated with the number of training hours. The findings suggest that the risk of LEA in Singapore youth athletes and dancers are multifaceted, involving factors such as type of activity, age, and training hours. Targeted and tailored interventions and programmes are thus needed to promote adequate energy availability for optimal physical and psychological growth in sport and dance. Full article

The online environment, where the boundaries between the domains of home, school, work, and leisure are blurred, poses new challenges for youth work practice. Due to limited research on this subject matter, the theoretical underpinnings of the online youth work practice are constrained. The fulfilment of youth work’s aims online, the position it can take in the online context, and its relation to its partners in the online lifeworld need a theoretical base. This paper seeks to analyse the role of youth work in the online lifeworld according to adolescents and youth work’s partners. The research was conducted in the Netherlands in collaboration with 14 youth work organisations. A qualitative research design was used: group conversations with young people and semi-structured interviews with youth work’s partners (i.e., parents, schools, informal networks, neighbourhood support teams, police, and municipal officials). The findings indicate that youth work in the online lifeworld, according to the respondents, is part of the general youth work practice, with a primary role of addressing the developmental needs of young people and creating new developmental opportunities. This role is expected to be fulfilled by engaging and connecting with young people in the online lifeworld and providing them instrumental, informational, socioemotional, and cognitive support. To do so, according to the partners, youth workers can make use of their vantage position in the online relationship with adolescents in order to access online information relevant for support and prudent prevention aimed at adolescents’ development. This vantage position may potentially encourage a collaboration between young people and partners, and between the online and offline youth work practice. Full article

Asian American (AsA) youth and emerging adults are growing at a faster rate than all other racial and ethnic populations in the United States. Burgeoning empirical evidence shows that they are experiencing increased adverse mental health outcomes since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. Additionally, trends in AsA youth and emerging adults’ utilization and help-seeking behaviors remain low. Health equity scholars posit that the model minority stereotype continues to obscure and minimize these mental health disparities. The current study aims to contribute to this vital research through a Photovoice study with AsA emerging adults. Fourteen AsA undergraduate students (M age = 19.77 years old; SD = 1.12) produced photographs and captions and participated in semi-structured interviews to describe mental health. Four themes were developed: (1) mind–body health connection and the belief that mental health is about the synchronization of one’s mind and body; (2) environmental connectedness and the view that mental health is connected to nature; (3) social connectedness and how interpersonal relationships influence mental health; and (4) the internalization of the “good Asian student” stereotype and its impact on mental health. Implications for culturally tailored prevention and intervention strategies are discussed to ultimately improve health equity. Full article