Positive Youth Development - Importance of Youth Development

Importance of Youth Development

During adolescence, young people experience profound physical changes, rapid growth and development, and sexual maturation, in addition to psychological and social changes. This often leads to issues with personal identity, sense of self, and emotional independence. In an attempt to cope with the complex changes and challenges of development, they may engage in behaviors considered to be experimental and risky Due to this, several important public health and social problems either begin or peak during these years including homicide, suicide, substance use and abuse, sexually transmitted infections, and teen and unplanned pregnancies. Addressing the positive development of young people can decrease these problems by facilitating their adoption of healthy behaviors and helping to ensure a healthy transition into adulthood

Read more about this topic:  Positive Youth Development

Famous quotes containing the words importance, youth and/or development:

    “In the United States all business not transacted over the telephone is accomplished in conjunction with alcohol or food, often under conditions of advanced intoxication. This is a fact of the utmost importance for the visitor of limited funds ... for it means that the most expensive restaurants are, with rare exceptions, the worst.”
    —John Kenneth Galbraith (b. 1908)

    “Care keeps his watch in every old man’s eye,
    And where care lodges, sleep will never lie;
    But where unbruisèd youth with unstuffed brain
    Doth couch his limbs, there golden sleep doth reign.”
    —William Shakespeare (1564–1616)

    “I can see ... only one safe rule for the historian: that he should recognize in the development of human destinies the play of the contingent and the unforeseen.”
    —H.A.L. (Herbert Albert Laurens)