Positive Youth Development: Thriving as the Basis of Personhood and Civil Society

Abstract

Thriving youth become generative adults through the progressive enhancement of behaviors that are valued in their specific culture and that reflect the universal structural value of contributing to civil society. A young person may be said to be thriving, then, if he or she is involved across time in such healthy, positive relations with his or her community and on the path to what M. Csikszentmihalyi and K. Rathunde described as “idealized personhood”. Applied developmental science efforts that promote thriving may involve enhancing the orientation of a person to contribute to healthy family life and community institutions while, at the same time, improving oneself in manners that enable such individual actions to be successful. Youth whose exchanges with their contexts are marked by functionally valued behaviors should develop integrated moral and civic identities and a transcendent, or spiritual, sensibility.

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