Parental involvement in their children's organised sports has increased dramatically in the last decade. Recent debate has started to question whether parental involvement actually has a beneficial impact on child sports participation, and whether this is damaging for the children's development of identity and autonomy. Prompted by this debate, we…

Programs that seek to engage participants in arts-based programming may be drawn to creative youth development (CYD), a youth-focused, holistic approach to learning through creative expression. As the Creative Youth Development National Partnership (2018) defines it, "'Creative youth development' is a recent term for a longstanding theory of…

Political elections have been shown to influence youth civic development. The election of Donald Trump is historic and has elevated precarity for people of color and immigrants, yet we know little about how young people with these identities experienced this potentially catalytic event. Using ethnographic methods, we examined youth and adult…

Intercultural Competence for Youth workers (ICY) was a project co-funded by the European Union Erasmus+ programme that ran for 14 months, from spring 2019 to spring 2020, and involved four organisations from Finland, Spain, Belgium, and the Netherlands. Engaging youth workers and young people with fewer opportunities, the project helped youth…

Over the last decade, The California Endowment (TCE) has invested in 14 communities that have historically been marginalized and denied opportunities for their residents to thrive. The initiative, known as Building Healthy Communities (BHC), focuses on creating places where children are healthy, safe, and ready to learn. Del Norte and Tribal Lands…

The necessity to implement evidence-based programs to support the healthy development of youth and families is becoming part of national policy. Organizations that are not "ready" to do so will likely lose resources, disallowing them to serve as they have set out to do. Consequently, the current survey study draws from a national sample…

School-based character education (CE) programs provide an opportunity to increase the moral fortitude of adolescents. This study is a preliminary evaluation of Inspire Aspire, a CE program that was implemented with 13- to 14-year-olds in Scotland. A relational developmental systems meta-theoretical approach and person-centered analyses were…

The phenomenon of "brokering"--or connecting youth to present or future opportunities--is now well known in the field of learning and youth development as an integral part of how and why youth pursue and remain in particular interest-related learning opportunities. More recently, the related term sponsorship refers to the multiple ways…

There is an ongoing discussion as to how life skills development and transfer should be addressed. Previously, researchers have proposed an implicit/explicit dichotomy to explain how life skills teaching occurs. As research within the area of sport-based youth development continues to progress, a model is needed to delineate the varying levels of…

In California, where 54% of students in kindergarten through grade 12 are Latino, only 21% of 4-H community club members fit this demographic. Consequently, California 4-H is focused on developing Latino membership. This article describes lessons we learned while developing and delivering a project targeting inclusion of Latino youths in an…

University of Idaho Extension 4-H professionals have learned to work with volunteers in new ways to expand capacity and continue to build the quality of the 4-H program in Idaho. This article identifies how defining new position descriptions for volunteer facilitation coaches addressed two program needs, expanded capacity, and provided a higher…

The need for youth credit card education is clear given the many statistics indicating increasing credit card debt and an overall scarcity of credit card education targeting youths. The Teen$ Credit Card simulation program offers youths an opportunity to experience "owning" a credit card, using it, and realizing the consequences of…

In this study, we examined associations between mentoring relationship quality, rejection sensitivity, and youth outcomes. Participants (N = 446) were part of a national, random assignment evaluation of Big Brothers Big Sisters of America school-based mentoring programs. Youth in more trusting mentoring relationships demonstrated reductions in…

This qualitative study examines the progress of a rural New Jersey school in addressing longstanding racial conflict after implementing a Youth Participatory Action Research project two years prior. Here we take up the thread as students continued to develop activities meant to increase awareness of ongoing issues, and as adults used professional…

The COVID-19 pandemic has created significant challenges for informal health science education, which traditionally involves face-to-face programming. We describe the adaptation of hands-on environmental health science kits for online and socially distanced informal education with diverse audiences. These hands-on science kits were traditionally…