Introducing the good adolescence
First posted at 07:57GMT on 05/04/09 by Sarah Schulman
Reach out has just finished the first of four phases of work in Brighton-Hove and Croydon. We’re in the third month of our 9 month project!
Our goal? To co-design new models of youth-adult provision that enable young people to want more and get more out of life.
Our starting point? Relationships are important. Successful adolescents have a range of people in their life to support them.
After two months of on-the-ground work, we’re looking beyond successful adolescents to the good adolescence. The language may be subtle, but the concepts are different. A successful adolescent is a young person who makes it through adolescence and into adulthood, well prepared to enter the world of work, further education, and independent living. The path is linear and the period time limited. The good adolescence is an experience that can occur at any age. It is about exploration, recognizing what you’re good at, exposure to difference, connections to new people and new settings, and finding a sense of self /place in the world. The path is recurring and elements are life-long.
Few of the adolescents we met are experiencing the good adolescence. We met about 200 young people and adults, and worked with 40 more intensively through ethnographies, psychoanalytic interviews, and design teams of siblings or friends. From comparing young people who were thriving with those who were not, we learned that four things seem particularly important for experiencing the good adolescence:
1) Feedback. Many of the young people we met receive a limited range of feedback about what they are good at and their underlying strengths (what we call capabilities). They may be immersed in a particularly dominant setting, like a friend group or the media or school, where the messages they hear don’t expand their sense of what’s possible.
2) Rich developmental narratives. Feedback is critical because it shapes the stories young people tell about themselves. The young people we met who are doing really well—who are experiencing the good adolescence—tell rich developmental narratives about themselves. These are stories that connect past experiences with the present and offer a future direction. Most of the young people we met articulated ‘limiting’ narratives, stories that are about a single skill, talent or role and offer a narrow sense of future possibility.
3) Connections across settings. Young people experiencing the good adolescence have ‘bridging’ relationships with people across at least three different settings—school or university, employment, a faith community, family, etc. Bridging relationships are those that broker young people to new experiences and opportunities.
4) Time and space. Resource is also critical—in particular, access to time and space. Young people experiencing the good adolescence had the time and space to explore and find out about themselves. This was time and space between institutions (maybe school and college or college and employment) or while embedded in institutions (like prison). The time and space was structured—it was set aside for reflection and self-development.
Over the next few months, we’ll be coming up with practical ways to help young people recognize their capabilities, build narratives, connect with bridging people, and have the time and space to reflect and explore. These service concepts will span across a range of settings: business, home, school, community, youth services. As our thinking develops, we’ll continue to share….