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

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

    One’s condition on marijuana is always existential. One can feel the importance of each moment and how it is changing one. One feels one’s being, one becomes aware of the enormous apparatus of nothingness—the hum of a hi-fi set, the emptiness of a pointless interruption, one becomes aware of the war between each of us, how the nothingness in each of us seeks to attack the being of others, how our being in turn is attacked by the nothingness in others.
    Norman Mailer (b. 1923)

    The importance to the writer of first writing must be out of all proportion of the actual value of what is written.
    Elizabeth Bowen (1899–1973)

    “You are old, Father William,” the young man cried,
    “And life must be hastening away;
    You are cheerful, and love to converse upon death:
    Now tell me the reason, I pray.”

    “I am cheerful, young man,” Father William replied;
    “Let the cause thy attention engage;
    In the days of my youth I remembered my God,
    And He hath not forgotten my age.”
    Robert Southey (1774–1843)

    Ultimately, it is the receiving of the child and hearing what he or she has to say that develops the child’s mind and personhood.... Parents who enter into a dialogue with their children, who draw out and respect their opinions, are more likely to have children whose intellectual and ethical development proceeds rapidly and surely.
    Mary Field Belenky (20th century)