To commemorate my retirement after 30 years with Search Institute, and more than 50 years in the positive youth development (PYD) field, I recently wrote a final summative essay about what I have seen, what I have been a part of and what I think needs to happen now for positive youth development as a field to continue its march onward as a force for good in the world — to continue making life better for millions of young people around the world, across political, racial, religious, sexual and gender, disability and economic lines. This article is a brief overview of that full essay, “A New Generation of Positive Youth Development: Inclusive Opportunity and Contribution for All Youth through Critical Developmental Relationships.”
Throughout my career I have held various roles across the country as a scholar, researcher, practitioner, policymaker and advocate for positive child and youth development. I’ve worked on many teams of incredibly talented and dedicated colleagues and with countless organizational partners around the world who, I believe it is accurate to say, have made a positive difference in the quality of life for tens of millions of young people worldwide. It has been both exhilarating and humbling to be part of all that. We as a field have come so far in promoting equitable positive youth development for all young people. And yet there is such a great distance yet to go.
[Related: When positive youth development meets the Native Tongues]
The full essay reviews the origins of and key influences on the field of positive youth development and Search Institute’s central role in the development of the field. It then highlights Search’s more recent creation of the developmental relationships framework for promoting youth thriving. Young people’s experience of those developmentally-influential relationships are the driving energy for the external and internal developmental assets all youth need to thrive.
The essay ends by discussing several themes that can be key parts of a research and practice agenda for a new generation of PYD that places developmental relationships as a critical vehicle for promoting opportunity and contribution for all youth, and the thriving of both youth and society.
1. Deepen understanding of the opportunities, challenges, resources and dynamics of becoming a more relationally-rich organization.
2. Deepen understanding of the ways in which sociocultural and sociohistoric factors shape interpretations, experiences and impacts of developmental relationships.
3. Better understand and activate young people themselves as drivers of developmental relationships.
4. Deepen understanding of how young people experience and cultivate developmental relationships with their peers.
5. Leverage in PYD practice a deeper knowledge of how single relationships have their effects within a larger web of developmental relationships.
Adolescent thriving: Individual purpose plus social contribution
This research and practice agenda is meant to advance the ultimate outcome of all PYD:
All young people are able to realize both their individual purposes and positive contributions to their families, communities and societies. Thriving is this combination of individual purpose plus social contribution.
This linkage between individual purpose and social contribution has long been held up as the sine qua non of adolescent thriving. As I outline in my 2017 report on high-quality OST activities and programs that promote thriving in youth and their settings, “Optimal development or thriving is not just about how youth are doing, but how their well-being and the well-being of the families, schools, communities, activities and programs they are in are bidirectionally connected. The inevitable connection between positive individual development and the health and well-being of society has been more recently elaborated by the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine (2019) report on The Promise of Adolescence.
Context and conclusion
No essay in 2025 about the development of young people can ignore that the United States has entered a dark time for all those who care about fairness in opportunities for all youth to thrive.
Courtesy of Peter C Scales
Peter C Scales, Ph.D.
Most pertinent for this essay have been the specific and undisguised purging of ideas and people who believe in diversity and equity, accurate and factual history, science and the rule of law that no one should be above, and the massive and possibly illegal de-funding of billions of dollars of grants to universities, states, localities and nonprofits who work in research and delivery of health, education and social services. All this makes working for the positive development of all our children and youth that much harder.
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What we learned about social capital mobilization]
It is therefore more important than ever for PYD researchers and practitioners to remain steadfast in communicating the long-term benefits of equitable, culturally responsive approaches to ensure that every young person is provided the developmental assets and relationships they need for a fair opportunity to succeed.
In my opinion, there is a clear research and practice agenda before us that leads us onward toward what should be a unifying goal in any democratic society:
To promote youth and society thriving by ensuring that every young person, no matter who they are, can achieve their individual purpose and contribute to the betterment of society by being rooted in intentional, inclusive and equitable developmental relationships across all the spaces of their lives.
We as a field of positive youth development have done a lot, and I am grateful beyond measure to have been a part of that for the last 50 years. And there is so much more to do. As the poet Longfellow said, “Let us, then, be up and doing.”
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Peter C. Scales, Ph.D., was Senior Fellow at Search Institute for 30 years until his retirement in June 2025. In his more than 50-year career in positive youth development, he was nationally and internationally known as a leading researcher and advocate in sexuality education, young adolescents and middle school reform, and developmental assets, thriving, spiritual development and developmental relationships. He was also a child abuse prevention executive and policymaker and, most recently, a leader in the youth sports world through the creation of the Compete-Learn-Honor approach that places effort, learning and high character under adversity ahead of winning.
