Summary of effective practices graphic

Summary of effective practices based on strong research evidence

Effective practices to increase young people's autonomy
  • Acknowledge youth perspectives
  • Be responsive to young people’s interests
  • Encourage initiative
  • Invite youth to consider, share and develop personal goals that are relevant to their life planning
  • Provide a rationale for rules
  • Offer meaningful choices, including options for youth to leave a program if they are no longer motivated to be involved
  • Provide opportunities for planning and decision making within programs
  • Ensure decision-making opportunities are meaningful, but not too stressful
  • Offer more structure and guidance to young people who are already dealing with a high level of responsibilities
  • Ensure deliberate use of unstructured time in positive social contexts
Effective practices to increase young people's relatedness
  • Provide emotionally supportive relationships particularly during the transition from elementary to secondary education
  • Provide opportunities for youth to build attachment, intimacy, and shared interests with their peers
  • Foster a sense of belonging in programs and broader organizational contexts
  • Support parents to build strong attachment bonds with their children
  • Provide opportunities for positive socialization with family and peers
  • Sustain adult-youth relationships for at least 6 months, with frequent contact, involvement, and closeness
  • Provide helpful, supportive, encouraging, dependable, and consistent mentor/advocate relationships with youth exiting care
  • Provide opportunities to recognize the impacts of racism, to explore youth’s cultural community and identity
  • Build youth-adult partnerships characterized by power-sharing
  • Coordinate community efforts to increase connections across young people’s families, schools and community programs
Effective practices to increase young people's competence
  • Offer opportunities for skill-building and mastery of different types of competence over time
  • Integrate communication, listening and cooperation skill-building
  • Provide opportunities to interact with youth with diverse perspectives and backgrounds
  • Integrate emotional skill-building so that youth can understand, identify and regulate emotions, and use positive emotions to foster well-being
  • Encourage youth to problem solve
  • Offer opportunities to reflect on and acknowledge individual and group achievements to improve young people’s perceived competence
  • Ensure appropriate challenge
  • Offer opportunities to explore options and make plans for the future
  • Provide opportunities for new experiences
  • Ensure breadth and depth of programs
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