OUR KIDS AND WHAT YOU CAN DO TO HELP
Wingspread Journal, Winter 1996

RANDOM ACTS OF ASSET BUILDING

Radio personality Garrison Keillor ends his monologues about his fictional Minnesota town of Lake Wobegon with the refrain "...where all the women are strong, all the men are good looking and all the children are above average." It's a wry comment on a world that doesn't exist, because we know, sadly, that we are not all strong and good looking and all our children are not exceptional. In fact, statistics, media profiles, and walks past the local high school indicate that many young people are facing incredible odds in growing up to be even "average."

Too many people, however, look at the state of America's youth, shake their heads, and stop there. Too many problems to fix, too many needs to fill. It's a perspective that's all wrong, says Peter Benson, president of Search Institute in Minneapolis. For the past six years, he has been focusing instead on the positive elements in young people's lives and mobilizing communities throughout the country to rally around a shared vision for young people that focuses on assets, not problems.

"Problem-focused models confine so much of our energy to what is delivered by professionals, by people we hire," Benson said at a recent Wingspread Briefing. "But that vision is limited. Instead, we need to focus on mobilizing every living, breathing human being-plus perhaps golden retrievers-to promote the positive in young people's lives. Everyone can be a part of the team, which means it is irrelevant if we have kids ourselves, had kids once, or never had kids."

What does it mean to promote the positive? Since 1990, Benson and Search Institute have studied more than a quarter-million young people from more than 450 school districts around the country to determine what "assets" and "deficits" in students' lives influence their ability to make positive choices. In other words, what developmental supports kids need to make it safely into productive adulthood.

The result is a list of 30 "assets" Search Institute determined will help equip adolescents to make wise choices. The asset checklist, printed on page 8, is notable, not for its new ideas, but for the many "incredibly obvious" indicators it profiles. Almost half of the 30 assets, for example, boil down to a strong, loving adult presence in a teen's life.

The first 16 assets are "external," positive webs of support that form a young person's environment: parents, schools, social and religious groups, community expectations. According to Benson, for many American young people these external assets are fragile indeed. Access to other adults, for example is uncommon in our society.

"This is the most age-segregated generation in the history of the world," says Benson. "My concern is that in the past, the wisdom of the community was shared intergenerationally, especially in terms of sharing positive values. How do we share values with the young, without having children hang around principled adults? Today, we've forgotten how to pass on wisdom."

The school climate is another area in which assets are becoming weakened. Young people need a strong, supportive school environment in order to flourish, yet, says Benson, at best only 30 percent of youth in grades 6 through 12 find their schools to be places of caring and concern.

And, when school is over, many young people go home to long stretches of unsupervised activity. Our culture takes it for granted that teenagers' time should be structured, yet the reality is that parental absence-through longer work hours or family breakdown-is increasing.

"In Minneapolis, for example, middle- and high-school kids have finished school by 1:30 in the afternoon," says Benson. "They are often home alone from 2 to 6 p.m. Parents are not central in the life of kids."

The second 14 assets are "internal," the values that young people should be making their own. These assets measure how well young people are being socialized, made "fit for society." Just as it is vital that a child's environmental influences be supportive, so these internal assets help young people stay on the right path and make positive decisions.

According to Benson, young people should ideally have 25 of the 30 assets. However, the typical student has only 17 of the 30. And, as youth get older and face tougher choices, the number of assets tends to decrease, not increase, especially in the areas of positive values, self control, and social support. These results hold true in urban, suburban and small-town settings, and across racial, gender, and ethnic lines.

Positive assets-"the good stuff for kids"-are too uncommon. Benson estimates that 75 percent of America's young people have less than 20 developmental assets.

Why is it disturbing that our communities cannot provide these developmental assets for our youngpeople? Research by Search Institute indicates that the number of assets a young person has will predict and explain life choices. The more assets a person has, the lower the risk she or he will engage in negative behaviors. For example, the percentage of youth who use alcohol falls from 44 percent of young people with 0 to 10 assets, to around 10 percent of youth with 21 to 25 assets.

"Assets are protective," says Benson. "They build resiliency and promote thriving and have an additive effect. The more assets you have, the better for the young person.

"More important, developmental assets are in our control. They come out of the experience and will of individuals in a community."

What can we do about this? In The Troubled Journey: A Portrait of 6th-12th Grade Youth, Benson lists recommendations for parents, educators, community leaders, and youth organizations. They include limiting overexposure to television, encouraging service learning, emphasizing the development of positive values, and creating a community-wide vision for positive youth development. "We must have a vision and a dream for the way in which communities can do better to wrap their arms around each and every child and teenager," says Benson.

That vision begins when a community shifts its vocabulary away from problems and starts to look at asset building. The vision begins when a community shifts its reach from the "problem" kids to "all" kids. The vision begins when a community mobilizes every breathing human being to help raise its children.

"The key to asset building is 'planned redundancy,'" says Benson. "By that I mean all sectors of community-neighborhoods, parents, the local McDonald's where kids work, the businesses and offices where parents work, churches, synagogues and mosques, the 4-H clubs-expose young people to the same assets over and over again. Adults need to be on the 'same team' speaking the same language about what each kid needs.

"We need purposeful asset building across the community, and we also need 'random acts' of asset building by individuals," says Benson. "There is a common core of commitment to things that matter. As communities, we must take time to name it, to share it, to talk about it and to keep it visible-for the future of our young people."

See Search Institute's 30 Developmental Assets for Young People