Thriving: A Personal Journey and an International Movement

September, 2005

by Peter Benson

The first time I used the term "thriving" was in 1990, to demark a set a positive outcomes (e.g., academic success, caring for others and their communities, the affirmation of cultural and ethnic diversity, commitment to healthy lifestyles), as a way to complement the litany of negative outcomes that, for decades, had dominated federal, state and foundation approaches to documenting the health of U.S. teenagers. Fifteen years later, I find myself as intrigued as ever by the processes, theories, and indicators of thriving as when Search Institute, way back when, first put a stake in the ground about thriving and America's youth. "Thriving" has come to represent the joyous substance of my life's work, as I seek, with others in the field of positive youth development, to change the way America views its young people. What is the dominant storyline about young people, ages 12 to 20? I believe that we must forge a new vocabulary about why youth matter and why their healthy development is crucial for growing the health and vibrancy of the society in which they live.

The foray into thriving indicators has three purposes:

1. to provide U.S. communities with a more balanced view of adolescents and their capabilities and contributions - guided by the hypothesis that the overuse of negative indicators tends to demonize youth, leading to the public's withdrawal from their lives;
   
   
2. to provide programs and agencies with an alternative set of metrics for evaluating program success (indeed, many youth development programs are designed with positive outcome intentions but forced to make their case by documenting impact on risk behaviors); and
   
   
3. to posit a set of positive indicators that could begin a national conversation about the kinds of constructive behavior, postures and commitments this society values and needs. As this conversation matures, it is expected that this new vocabulary will transform our frames of reference for how well we as a society are rearing our children and adolescents. National success in this arena informs everything else, including the economy, the vitality of the workforce, life expectancy, and perhaps - most importantly - how future generations of adults engage as parents and citizens.

In the last five years, considerable advances have occurred in discussing, naming and measuring positive outcomes. The labels for this work include flourishing, optimal development, competence and well-being. A recently published volume titled What Children Need to Flourish: Conceptualizing and measuring Indicators of Positive Development (Moore & Lippman, 2005) offers a taxonomy of positive outcome indicators including life satisfaction, hope, generosity, spirituality, connectedness, self-regulation and community service. Since 2001, Search Institute, in collaboration with social scientists at Fuller, Stanford, and Tufts, has sought to identify those thriving indicators that have the greatest saliency in the lives of our youth and are the most crucial to the well-being of a democratic society. Significant progress is being made on this continuing, important work.

As crucial as it is to continue the dialogue on identifying desirable and socially-valued positive outcomes, a new and compelling issue is surfacing. While positive outcomes are important "benchmarks" (along with reducing negative outcomes) for measuring how well a nation is raising its young, we also must seek to understand how it is that a life of hope and generosity and engagement evolves or develops across time. The question here is whether, from (let's say) ages 12-18, a young person is moving toward, or is on a pathway to, a hopeful future. Growing healthy human beings requires far more than knowing about "end points" we seek to get them to or bombarding them with a new set of programs seeking to engineer them toward socially-valued endpoints. Lives develop. They grow and change across time. So a key issue is about developmental trajectories. And there are many trajectories or paths. The social sciences know a lot more about negative trajectories (e.g., how young people develop an antisocial life or "grow" into any number of psychopathologies). What is missing is a parallel understanding of upward trajectories of development via which, across time, young people flower into the kinds of persons who embrace life and make full use of their special gifts.

Thriving is the term I now use to discuss this upward developmental trajectory. It can be more poetically understood as being on a pathway to a hopeful future. Being in a thriving mode could happen (and should happen) across the lifespan. While my current interest is in understanding the thriving process among young people, there is a need to also understand the process at other points in time. Everyday now I find myself wondering: am I, a seasoned adult, living in a thriving mode? And I use the thriving lens constantly in understanding how my adult children are doing and how the many staff are doing who work at Search Institute. That latter question raises the interesting issue of what a work culture looks like that promotes thriving people.

My thinking about thriving is grounded in the theory of positive youth development. It starts with several principles:

• all youth have the inherent capacity for positive growth and development,
  
  
• positive growth is enabled when youth are embedded in nurturing relationships and environments;
  
  
• growth is further promoted when youth have the opportunities to participate in multiple, nutrient-rich contexts;
  
  
• while support and empowerment is important in the lives of all youth, how that support needs to happen will vary according to the individual youth, and the social, ethnic, and cultural contexts within which that youth lives;
  
  
• communities have the potential to be powerful contexts for positive youth development to take place; and,
  
  
• youth are major actors in their own development.

There is particular developmental magic when young people discover an aspect of themselves that gives them joy and energy, when they invest in its exploration and expression and when this aspect of their lives is connected to people and places that know, affirm and actively encourage their "spark." This is the magic of thriving. It is self and context playing together to give a young person the opportunity and courage to choose to be on an upward developmental trajectory.

I suspect that every parent, grandparent and teacher [in fact every adult] has something positive in mind when thinking about what they want for kids. "I want my son to fly." "I want my daughter to be the best she can be." "I want my grandchildren to be happy." "I want my students to make a difference in the world." "I want all children to have the chance to live up to their fullest potential."

We all have these aspirations for our young. Aren't these the images that should come forward when we talk about how our nation is doing in raising our young? I am reminded that a common greeting in the Masai culture is "and how is it with the children?" I doubt that the answer to their question focuses on the frequency of violence, drug use, carrying weapons or hurting someone. Instead, I am sure the conversation moves to how the children are moving forward, how they are making their way in the world, how they are strengthening and exercising their gifts and talents. My passion is to provide parent, youth-workers, and policy-makers with a new vocabulary and a transformed view of America's diverse youth that empowers them to move towards a hopeful and meaningful future.

Recommended Readings

I. Theory and Research

Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1990). Flow: The psychology of optimal experience. NY: Harper & Row.

Keyes, C.L.M. (2003). Promoting a life worth living: Human development from the vantage points of mental illness and mental health. In R.M Lerner, D. Wertlieb, & F. Jacobs (Eds.), Handbook of applied developmental science (Vol. 4) (pp. 257-274). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Moore, K. & Lippman, L. (2005). What do children need to flourish? Conceptualizing and measuring indicators of positive development. NY: Kluwer Academic/Plenum.

Scales, P.C. & Benson, P.L. (2005). Adolescence and thriving. In C.B. Fisher & R.M. Lerner (Eds.), Encyclopedia of applied developmental science (Vol. 1) (pp.15-19). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.

II. Stories of Thriving Youth

Barrett, B., Annis, A., & Riffey, D. (2004). Little moments; big magic: Inspirational stories of Big Brothers and Big Sisters and the magic they create. Gilbert, AZ: Magical Moments Publishing.

Delisle, J. (1991). Kid stories: Biographies of 20 young people you'd like to know. Minneapolis, MN: Free Spirit.

Desetta, A., & Wolin, S. (2000). The struggle to be strong: True stories by teens about overcoming tough times. Minneapolis, MN: Free Spirit.

Peter Benson is the President of Search Institute