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 of, importance, youth and/or development:

    “For even satire is a form of sympathy. It is the way our sympathy flows and recoils that really determines our lives. And here lies the vast importance of the novel, properly handled. It can inform and lead into new places our sympathy away in recoil from things gone dead. Therefore the novel, properly handled, can reveal the most secret places of life: for it is the passional secret places of life, above all, that the tide of sensitive awareness needs to ebb and flow, cleansing and freshening.”
    —D.H. (David Herbert)

    “I am not sure that it is of the first importance that you should be happy. Many an unhappy man has been of deep service to himself and to the world.”
    —Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924)

    “His golden locks time hath to silver turned;
    O time too swift, O swiftness never ceasing!
    His youth ‘gainst time and age hath ever spurned,
    But spurned in vain; youth waneth by increasing.
    Beauty, strength, youth are flowers but fading seen;
    Duty, faith, love are roots, and ever green.”
    —George Peele (1559–1596)

    “The man, or the boy, in his development is psychologically deterred from incorporating serving characteristics by an easily observable fact: there are already people around who are clearly meant to serve and they are girls and women. To perform the activities these people are doing is to risk being, and being thought of, and thinking of oneself, as a woman. This has been made a terrifying prospect and has been made to constitute a major threat to masculine identity.”
    —Jean Baker Miller (20th century)