Youth Development Tips
- Youth are moving from less mature
and responsible ways of thinking and acting, to the more mature and
responsible judgments and activities of successful adults
- Youth
are working to develop skills and competencies that all adults need.
These include personal and social skills, thinking and reasoning
skills, work-readiness skills and citizenship skills.
- Youth
develop these competencies by interacting with other people and by
taking on new challenges in their family, school, community and
workplace.
- Mental
development in adolescence means an increase in abstract thinking and
in the ability to generalize and problem-solve. Youth who are not quite
there yet will tend to be very concrete thinkers.
- A
work environment provides an opportunity to develop and practice these
thinking and problem-solving skills, but for younger adolescents, these
are very new abilities-they have to be allowed to make some mistakes
along the way. If you give them support and guidance while they try out
these new abilities, it will earn you their gratitude and will lead
them to do a better job.
- Youth are going through rapid physical development, and these changes are exciting and confusing to them.
- Youth
are also going through rapid emotional development. They are caught up
in the tumultuous feelings associated with this stage of life.
- Similarly,
youth are moving from dependence to independence - they want to have
greater responsibility, but this is also new to them.
- Youth
are also struggling through a process of moral development: the ability
to think about the needs and concerns of a larger group as opposed to
focusing entirely on their own needs and wants.
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