MCHB EPI Atlanta Conference
 
December 5 - 7, 2006

You've Got to Accentuate the Positive:

Research on Protective Factors for Child Well-Being

JACQUELYNNE ECCLES: All right. I’m Jackie Eccles and I’m going to build on the presentations of Doctors Moore and Brindis. Both stressed the importance of positive youth development and the need for us to be measuring indicators of positive development on a regular basis, because positive assets are important for maintaining good health. Both also stressed the importance of positive contexts for development. It is this point that I’m going to elaborate. Dr. Brindis stressed the protective roles of strong connections with parents and schools for positive development during adolescence.

I’m going to focus on the schools in my talk. I’m going to discuss the declines in engagement in both schools and other organized youth development programs and centers. I’m going to provide a possible developmental explanation for these declines, and finally I’m going to summarize what we know about creating programs that will keep youth engaged.

As was evident in Dr. Brindis’ talk with data from California, the one thing that we know is that on average children and then adolescents’ interest in engagement in school and other organized activity settings decline with age. Every developmental study that’s been done looking at this shows that as young people move from elementary school into adolescence, their interest in school, their participation in school, their engagement in school declines, and this is also true for their engagement in all kinds of positive activities outside of the home and after school. Whether they’re faith-based or community-based or simply generated from the family themselves such as music lessons or other kinds of activities. At the same time, as you’ve already seen, we see increasing rates of depression, anxiety, and other indicators of poor mental health increase across the childhood to adolescence, and similarly we see rates of involvement in all kinds of problem behavior increasing during this period.

Why? And is there anything we can do about it? Before I answer these questions, I’m going to say a little bit more about what I think well-being is and how to put this into a developmental frame that may help us to understand these declines. From my perspective, well-being is an affective state one experience when individuals believe they are functioning well in the various social context in which they live. So what I’m asking you to think about is young people, as they move across their day in the various social context that they have to interact with. This can be families in the morning, schools for a big chunk of the day. It also includes going from class to class in school. It includes engagement with peers. Then it takes up their afternoon hours. What do they do in their afternoon hours? What do they do when they go home? Where do they feel good? How does their feeling about being in these context change as they move from childhood, from their elementary school years into secondary school years?

This affective state includes what does well-being actually look like? And actually Dr. Moore mentioned this. It really includes feelings of contentment, satisfaction, and happiness. You can imagine in your own lives. When do you feel good? When do you feel engaged? Or to use Dr. Schitzomaheitz’s terms, when do you feel in a state of flow? When are you fully engaged in a setting? That’s what I would call well-being in the moment.

Such feelings, we believe, are facilitated when individual’s needs are being met in their social contexts. In other words, when their various personal needs are really being fulfilled by the kinds of activities that they’re engaged in. When the context provides them opportunities to have their needs filled. And finally, we believe that people will seek out social contexts that do meet their needs and will disengage from contexts that don’t. Now, as adults we have a great deal of autonomy. Well, some of us do. We can move from job to job. We can change spouses. We can take on new spouses. We can help to structure the context that we’re in. That’s far less true for children and adolescents. The adults in their lives structure their contexts and insist that they go through them, many of them for a great deal of their time.

Given this perspective my colleagues and I believe, and have shown empirically, that declining engagement and feelings of connectedness to schools and other organized activities result from a mismatch between the needs of the maturing adolescent and the opportunities provided for them within the school context, often within their families and other organized activity settings as well. We believe this is particularly true for youth who are already doing poorly in school academically, that have begun experiencing a lot of failure experiences during their elementary school years, for youth who are doing poorly in school socially, for youth who feel discriminated against in these contexts, due to their gender, their race ethnicity, their religion, their language, their disabilities, the way they look, anything that makes them feel like the other adults and children in their lives really are denying them opportunities because of something about them over which they have no control. And kids who are bullied or dissed by their peers; and of course we’re finding increasingly that this is happening to more and more kids than we would have ever expected.

Now, what are these needs? Dr. Brindis listed eight basic needs. She suggested that love; belonging, respect, mastery, safety, challenge, power and meaning are critical needs that individuals bring to every context that they’re in. And if those needs are met by even my perspective, they’re likely to thrive and be engaged and be willing to take on the tasks that those contexts are providing them. In other words, to learn what schools have to teach, or to be engaged with the adults in the out of school programs or the faith-based programs. Or listen to one’s parents and take on the values that one’s parents are trying to teach.

Now, these are very similar to other lists, the psychologists spend--many psychologists spend a good part of their careers trying to figure out what these basic needs are. So I’m going to give you my set, which is quite similar. The first set really comes from the work of Connell, D.C. and Ryan. They argued that individuals have three basic needs: competence, emotional support and autonomy. And I’m just going to mention what each of those are.

So to feel competent in a setting, means that the setting presides, provides opportunities for you to master what is being taught in that setting. If you don’t feel like you’re mastering what’s taught in that setting, you’re not going to feel competent in that setting, and also the opportunity for challenge; to learn more, to move forward.

Second. Emotional support. What is emotional support? That’s a feeling of belonging and being included. It’s a feeling of attachment. This comes closer to what Dr. Brindis meant--talked about as being connected. This is really being emotionally connected, caring about being in this place, coupled with emotional support that you have adults that you can go to in that setting, who will help you solve your emotional problems, who will provide emotional support for you.

And finally, autonomy. Now, this is D.C. and Ryan’s term. I want to define what it is because it’s not being disconnected. It’s really feeling ownership, feeling like you have some control over what you’re doing in that setting, that you have ownership for your behavior in that setting and that what you’re doing in that setting is meaningful to you. So it’s sort of a sense of being able--that you are the master of your fate within that setting, isn’t it? Your behavior is not totally being controlled outside of you.

I would like to add to that another set. This is particularly important for adolescence and that’s the group of kids that I care, that I have studied a lot. The first of these is mattering and I think this is the one that we as a country are falling very, very low on for our adolescence. Mattering is the belief that one is making a meaningful difference. That one is being a contributing member of one’s social group; that one is respected by both one’s peers and adult leaders in a setting. We all need to feel that we make a difference; that we matter. Young people need this in particular, particularly adolescence who often feel disenfranchised by the adults in their communities.

Identity. Another critical issue of adolescence. We need an opportunity for young people to have strong positive social identities and by that I mean a connectedness to the social groups that they are members of. This can be racial groups, this can be gender, this can be members of a team so that a strong sense that you are identified with a larger social network than yourself. And coherent and positive personal identities, opportunities to explore who you are and where you’re going.

And finally, flow. Experiences that are both challenging and enjoyable.

I come out of a person environment. Fit, as I’ve already mentioned, that if these needs are met in schools and other structure-positive youth development settings or programs, then adolescence will be motivated to remain connected and engaged. If not, they will leave or become disconnected or disengaged and we should not be surprised if that’s a consequence. If they turn to risky settings, to risky peer groups in order to have these needs met. My colleagues and I believe that the probability of such a fit in schools, in particular, decreases as children move into and through adolescence. Furthermore, we believe it is quite possible to design educational and positive youth development programs in such a way as to reverse this trend.

And finally, we believe that it is our responsibility as adults in the communities to make sure this happens. Now, let me give you an example from research. So this is basically a model that derives from what I’ve been telling you. If you look at your far left, we have school characteristics. We know various things about schools. We believe that those will affect psychological mediators, such as the feelings of belonging, feelings of confidence, feelings of ownership, feelings of battering, a sense of well-being; which in turn will promote positive development in terms of mental health, academic motivation, school engagement and physical health.

Within our own work we’ve been doing a longitudinal studies and this is the way we have operationalized from the kids perspective, their view of schools. So under support for autonomy we’ve measured teacher expectations, kids’ beliefs that their teachers expect them to do well. The kids’ perceptions of the extent to which the school provides what we call, “academic goal structures.” That the school stresses mastery; meaning that you learn a lot from the time you go to school until the end of the year versus performance orientation, which means you perform better than other kids, which of course, if that’s what the school is focused on then your grade is pretty much determined by what you knew before you ever took the course not by how well and not by how much you learn in the course.

Support for ownership and autonomy whether the curriculum is meaningful and whether there is student empowerment in voice, and finally support for belonging and mattering, which is, are the kids exposed to discriminatory experiences and do they believe that they’re socially supported by their teachers?

Now, I’m going to show you some regressions that I’m going to do. I’m going to give in this order, two of them. First, I’m going to enter individual demographics. Second, school demographics. Third, seventh grade adjustment measures. So I’m going to look at change overtime in the two adjustment measures that I’m going to report you. And finally, these perceived school context measures to show you that in fact, the perceptions of school environments do account for developmental changes in these outcomes.

Okay. First, I’m going to look at what I call psychological distress, which is an aggregate measure of depression, anxiety, anger, the full array of measures of psychological, mental health functioning. And as you can—these are now—at first I’m predicting good family demographics and as you can see parental educational attainment is negatively related to distress, occupational status interestingly, is positively related to psychological distress. In this particular study, which is 66 percent African-American but with the wide range of socio-economic functioning and 35 percent European-American.

The more important thing, psychological distress is quite stable over time. This is to show you the facts. Now, perceptions that you’re being discriminated against because of your gender or your race leads to increases after you’ve controlled for these background variables and prior competence leads to increases in psychological distress. And perceptions at the school is ability goal for structures that means that they’re focused on relative performance to other kids as opposed to mastery. And perceptions of positive teacher expectations predict in the positive direction to changes. Those young people who believe that they’re primarily being judged based on how well they do compared to other kids over time become more psychologically distressed, whereas those kids who believe that their teachers have high expectations for them become less distressed overtime.

Now, school motivation. This is a set of measures that capture engagement in school, interest in school, participation in school. These are the background measures. This is the prior performance, which just shows how stable these factors are. But now, if we look at the three areas I’m talking about. This is support for competence. Beliefs that your teachers have positive expectations for you and beliefs that the school is judging you on improvement rather than relative performance leads to increases in motivation overtime. Beliefs that the curriculum is meaningful leads to increases in school motivation over time and finally, beliefs that you’re being rationally discriminated against lead to decreases in school motivation over time, and perceived teacher supportiveness leads to increases in motivation over time.

Let us skip over these. Okay. What might maintain engagement? So our data essentially shows that to the extent the young people feel supported, that the school provides support for their need for competence, their need for belonging and their need for autonomy lead to increasing involvement in school and decreasing mental health problems, whereas the absence of these beliefs lead to the opposite. So what might we do to maintain engagement? I was recently chair of the National Research Council Panel on community-based programs for youth. We looked on that panel at a variety of development literatures to identify those characteristics that lead to high support for engagement.

Let me just summarize these for you. Oops, those got backwards. Okay. First, age and culturally appropriate structures and social norms. This is particularly important for adolescents. There needs to be appropriate levels of monitoring, rules and controls. Now I say developmentally appropriate. This is a dance that you can imagine between adults and young people as they move from childhood into adolescence. We as adults need to release control and allow them to take increasing control over their behavior so that by the time they’re 21, they can control their behavior on their own. So it’s a dance and if you control it too much, it’s going to have a negative effect and if you don’t control enough, it’s going to have a negative effect. We also know that adolescents absolutely endorse the need for clear rules and limits. They don’t want adults out of their lives, they want adults in their lives but they also want these rules to be applied consistently and fairly, and they are very sensitive to inequities.

Second, opportunities to belong. You’ve heard this before. They need opportunities for social inclusion for all groups. So the best programs and the best families include everyone. They don’t target their programs for specific groups of kids. They encourage strong, positive social identity formation. They give young people a chance to explore their social identities. Their race, their gender, their religion, those are things that are very important to young people because they want to belong to larger social groups.

Opportunities to form strong ties with supportive adults. This is the period developmentally when young people need to move beyond their family to other adults in their lives. Our world right now in the United States has really made this extraordinarily difficult for our young people. In fact, teachers may be the last place that we can know for sure that our young people will have a chance to form strong ties with non-familial adults. And they need to be in places that prevent exclusionary behaviors among the participants of all kinds, bullying and any form of discrimination.

Opportunities for mattering and leadership. Good programs, good families provide lots of opportunities for youth-based empowerment. Opportunities to provide meaningful services to one’s community and opportunities to move into positions of leadership and responsibility as one becomes more expert in the area that you’re talking about.

Opportunities for developing a sense of competence, what I call motivational scaffolding. Provision of challenging activities with the stress on improvement and cooperation. Stress mastery not competition. Opportunities to demonstrate and celebrate one’s accomplishments and high expectations for everyone. Opportunities to learn the essential skills that are needed for success in our society and opportunities to be challenged.

Milby McLaughlin looked back over all of these characteristics. She was also on this panel and she sort of said, “What are we talking about?” And she came to the conclusion that we’re talking about what educators, people interested in curriculum in schools, call intentional learning environments. What are intentional learning environments? They’re knowledge-centered, they’re assessment-centered, and they’re youth-centered. Let me just give you some examples.

Knowledge-centered learning contexts. They have a clear-learning foci. They’re about something in particular. They’re not just a place for kids to hang out. They have quality content and exemplary instruction. They use principles of embedded curriculum so that a range of academic competencies and life skills are taught within each type of activity in ways that build on the children and adolescent’s interest in curiosity. The very best sports programs are perfect examples of this. They can be used to teach Physics, Biology, Kinesiology, Management, Business, as well as values, ethics and social skills. Use of many different types of teachers, including youth themselves. One of the very best programs that we looked at was cross-age tutoring. This program took eighth grade students who are absolutely bound to drop out. Everything about them looked like they were at risk. Everyone would have predicted they would have never made it through school. This school district allowed these eighth graders to mentor second graders who are already falling behind in reading. These eighth graders were only reading at the fourth grade level themselves, but that’s better than a second grader. So you could take advantage of their strengths and let them tutor second graders. What happened? You didn’t even need statistics in this particular program. Every eighth grader who participated went on to graduate from high school, and furthermore, read at the 12th grade level when they graduated from high school. In addition, the second graders that they started tutoring did not fall behind. They, by the time that they were in the fifth grade, were reading at the fifth grade level.

Assessment-centered. Clearly, articulated cycles of planning, practice and performance that involve the kids themselves. Regular opportunities for feedback and recognition, often through public performances and other forms of celebration, and they focus on feedback, on improvement, meeting individual objectives rather than competition and social comparison.

And finally, youth-centered learning context, they respond to the diverse talents, skills and interests by providing a rich array of activities that have opportunities to participate at all levels of expertise. They identify and build on the strengths of each participating youth by providing opportunities for each youth to do what they can do best, as well as to learn new skills, essentially taking advantage of this cross-age or cross-skill level tutoring. Put kids together not based on them all being alike but on them having very different levels of expertise and interests so they can teach each other and move forward. Using developmentally and culturally appropriate materials that allow youth to grow in skills and leadership within specific activities.

Finally, there should be opportunities for choice. Together, these characteristics should make the experiences both challenging and enjoyable. They will also support the development of needed cognitive and social skills. And finally and most importantly, they will increase the probability of children’s engagement in activities in exactly those places we would like our children to spend their time. Now, I want to--I have two minutes so I--how many of you saw me on ABC News a couple of nights ago? No? Okay. It was 10 seconds; but anyway there was--it was about the controversy over out of school activities. And many of you may know that there’s a report that’s come out that’s worried that our kids are too engaged, are overly scheduled, okay? I had the opportunity of being involved in the only nationally based dataset that had time use on which we could actually find out how many youth in America are in fact over scheduled and whether we should be worried about this problem because clearly I don’t think so. From what I’ve said I think we need to provide places for our kids to be engaged.

Well, the ABC piece didn’t quite give the message that I wanted, what we found is that between three and six percent of young people in the United States are participating in organized activities outside of school 20 or more hours a week, most of them are 20, very few over 25. Now, that’s a small number, that’s the group that one might say is overscheduled but it’s only three to six percent of the population. What they didn’t present in that clip is that 50 percent of Americans’ youth are involved in no activities. So what we did was to give a time diary for young people of two days, two randomly selected days, one weekend day and one week day and I can tell you that in our data 50 percent of the kids in this country on any given, randomly selected day are not involved in any organized activity after school. What are they doing? They’re going home and watching television, they’re hanging out at the mall, they’re doing a variety of other activities. I would argue to you that what we ought to be concerned about is that 50 percent. It is primarily due to the fact that there are not easily accessible programs that meet their needs near their homes so that they can go there after school safely. I think that’s something we should be paying attention to. Thank you.