Youth development programs seek to improve the lives of children and adolescents by meeting their basic physical, developmental, and social needs and by helping them to build the competencies needed to become successful adults. Examples of youth development programs include community service, mentoring programs, and neighborhood youth centers.
It is unclear exactly how many youth development programs are operating in the United States in the early twenty-first century. In 1998 the Internal Revenue Service identified more than 5,700 nonprofit organizations–almost 3 percent of all charitable agencies–that focused their primary services on youth development. In addition, countless other organizations offer youth development activities within a different primary focus. Examples include youth groups within religious organizations and after-school activities offered by public elementary schools.
The purpose of this entry is to provide an overview of youth development programs. It is organized in the following manner. First, a brief history of services for children and youth is presented. Second, the current framework for youth development programs, including school-based youth development efforts, is discussed. Next, issues regarding access to youth development programs and findings from evaluations of youth development efforts are presented. Finally, several issues regarding implementation of youth development programs and future research directions are discussed.
Historical Development of Youth Development Programs
The concept of childhood as a unique and crucial stage of human development is a relatively recent idea. Until the mid-1800s, children were viewed as miniature adults who, without strict guidance from their families, would follow their natural inclination toward aggression, stubbornness, sinfulness, and idleness to their doom. Not surprisingly, the earliest programs and services for children who were poor, orphaned, delinquent, or mentally ill focused heavily on helping them avoid their natural inclination toward vice and sought to help them gain useful occupation. Apprenticeships were arranged for older children, while younger children were cared for in almshouses where their health, morals, and education would be improved with the overall goal of ensuring future self-sufficiency.
Beginning in the mid-1800s, numerous factors combined to influence a transformation in the view of children and childhood and subsequently in services for children. Writings of the English philosopher John Locke (1632–1704) and American transcendentalists fostered the view of children as pure and good human beings who learn from experience and, as a result, are corrupted only by the influence of society. The nineteenth-century English naturalist Charles Darwin's theory of evolution–specifically its premise of environmental influence on behavior and development–contributed to the growing belief that, with appropriate nurturing, children could be molded into successful adults. As a result, childhood began to be viewed as a particularly critical point in human development. Friedrich Froebel (1782–1852), the German educator and founder of the kindergarten movement, encouraged this viewpoint and contended that children required special preparation for adulthood, as well as opportunities for recreation and play. The publication of American psychologist and educator G. Stanley Hall's seminal work Adolescence in 1904 expanded this notion to older children and served to further cement such views.
This shift led to significant changes in services for children and adolescents. Institutions specifically designed to nurture the needs of children replaced apprenticeships and almshouses. Although the earliest institutions for children date to the mid-1700s, the movement to remove children from almshouses did not gain broad support until the nineteenth century. In 1861 Ohio passed the first state statute calling for the mandatory removal of all children from county almshouses, and by 1890 about 600 institutions–mostly owned and operated privately by religious and ethnic groups–were serving indigent children. Institutional child care during this period tended to take an undemocratic and antifamily approach characterized by discipline, training, and rehabilitation. These institutions operated with minimal oversight and mass care, rather than individualized attention, was the norm. Support for institutional child care waned for several reasons including increased economic uncertainty; the inability to build institutions at a rate sufficient to meet the needs of a growing number of orphaned, dependent, and delinquent children; the rise of public education; and the reduction in apprenticeship and legal indenture opportunities.
Child-care institutions were quickly replaced by a movement to place needy children with families. Led by the New York Children's Aid Society and its founder, the Reverend Charles Loring Brace, this movement focused on helping delinquent and needy children from New York City's poorest classes by transplanting them to a more healthful environment. Under Brace's direction, thousands of children were transported on orphan trains from New York City slums to live with farm families in the expanding West. Although they were subsidized by the city and the state, Brace's orphan trains failed to live up to his ideals. The families with whom the children lived often took advantage of their labor and failed to provide them with even the basic necessities and education. Poor families resented having their children sent so far away, and eventually the western states complained about what they perceived to be the dumping of thousands of delinquent and needy children each year. The economic shift from an agrarian society to an industrial society reduced the need for child labor on farms and further doomed this movement. Brace's conviction that family life was best for children and youth, however, continues to influence services for children to this day.
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