Life Skills - Youth: Behavior Prevention Vs. Positive Development

Youth: Behavior Prevention Vs. Positive Development

While certain life skills programs focus on teaching the prevention of certain behaviors the Search Institute has found those programs can be relatively ineffective. Based upon their research The Family and Youth Services Bureau, a division of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services advocates the theory of Positive Youth Development as a replacement for the less effective prevention programs. Positive Youth Development, or PYD as it's come to be known as, focuses on the strengths of an individual as opposed to the older methods which tend to focus on the "potential" weaknesses that have yet to be shown. The Family and Youth Services Bureau has found that individuals who developed life skills in a positive, rather than preventive, manner feel a greater sense of competence, usefulness, power, and belonging.

Read more about this topic:  Life Skills

Famous quotes containing the words behavior, prevention, positive and/or development:

    He is not a true man of science who does not bring some sympathy to his studies, and expect to learn something by behavior as well as by application. It is childish to rest in the discovery of mere coincidences, or of partial and extraneous laws. The study of geometry is a petty and idle exercise of the mind, if it is applied to no larger system than the starry one.
    Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)

    ... if this world were anything near what it should be there would be no more need of a Book Week than there would be a of a Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children.
    Dorothy Parker (1893–1967)

    It is easy and dismally enervating to think of opposition as merely perverse or actually evil—far more invigorating to see it as essential for honing the mind, and as a positive good in itself. For the day that moral issues cease to be fought over is the day the word “human” disappears from the race.
    Jill Tweedie (b. 1936)

    Sleep hath its own world,
    And a wide realm of wild reality.
    And dreams in their development have breath,
    And tears, and tortures, and the touch of joy.
    George Gordon Noel Byron (1788–1824)