Invited Commentary: The Positive Youth Development Perspective is an Exciting Direction for Adolescent and Family Policies and Programs

Social policy is typically directed at reducing or preventing problems, and not ordinarily to promoting positive outcomes. In regard to youth development, policy makers or those charged by them with implementing policy-predicated actions, devote more effort to decreasing or preventing problems that are visible and about which constituents agree are bad (teenage pregnancy, school dropout, or substance use and abuse) than in promoting things that may seem to constituents as ephemeral, abstract, or even “impossible” to measure, e.g., self esteem, confidence, or caring for others. The articles in this special issue and, indeed, across the totality of research in the field of Positive Youth Development (PYD) (e.g., see Lerner, Phelps, Forman, & Bowers, 2009, for a review of the PYD literature) are therefore innovative and, to my mind, exciting. From a policy maker’s perspective, the research from the 4-H Study represents a new, evidence-based approach to promoting good things in young people and not merely to preventing what are often regarded as inevitable problems. …