Books in the J-B MHS Single Issue Mental Health Services series

Raises questions regarding the subject of youth leadership, including: What exactly is youth leadership? Is it different from adult leadership? How does it relate to productive youth development? Can it be taught? If so, what are the best and worst practices?

Addressing a timely topic in the field, this special issue covers the benefits of cultivating mindfulness to foster positive development and flourishing in adolescents.

Youth substance use and misuse are still highly common, despite substantial efforts made to reduce the problem. Early start with substance use is often associated with more severe short- and long-term negative consequences for youth psycho-social adjustment.

This volume builds understanding of practices in youth and community development that create or build social capital assets at the individual, group, and community levels.

Today s youth is confronted not only with the developmental tasks of adolescence, but also with substantial social and economic changes on the macro level originating from globalization and economic volatility.

It's not all "fun and games. " A growing body of research suggests that recreation activities can be powerful development contexts when they are properly framed and intentionally designed.

New technologies are playing an important role in the lives of young people. From mobile phones to social media sites, from video games to virtual worlds, young people are immersed in a technologically rich environment, in a participatory culturue where they are not only consuming content, but also producing it and sharing it with others.

This volume examines how developmental issues facing older youth impact their crossover into early adulthood, and investigates innovative strategies being employed to better meet the needs of these youth. Implications for policymakers and funders in taking the support of older youth to scale are also considered in this volume.

The transition from care to independent living has become a recent focus for research given the poor outcomes that have been documented to date.

This issue recognizes the critical importance in guiding young people toward mature decision making in the arena of ethics and explores ways in which that guidance can take shape. Through surveys, observation, and interviews, chapter authors have designed activities geared to reshape the way youngsters and others think about right and wrong.

Learn about the kinds of learning tools and experiences that are most likely to foster a positive and engaged sense of purpose for diverse groups of youth. This groundbreaking research is among the first in recent years to explicitly address the supports of youth purpose and construct youth purpose interventions.

Take a cutting edge look at the civic engagement of young people. Increasingly recognized as an important feature of democratic functioning in communities, it has also become clear that the civic domain is indispensable as a context for understanding human development processes.

Explore the complexity of teacher-student relationships in secondary school settings and learn how these largely unscripted relationships function for students and teachers in their learning and socioemotional development.

What skills and attributes will allow young people to succeed in the new global economy? This volume addresses the question by examining the topic of twenty-first century learning.

This volume summarizes the community school experiences of the Children's Aid Society and Beacons in New York City and other places; university assisted models in Philadelphia; school system generated community schools in Chicago; communitywide councils in Evansville, Indiana, and Portland, Oregon; and Boston's Full-Service Schools Roundtable.

Gaining an understanding about the barriers in transitioning from high school to college is crucial to improving college access and matriculation particularly for low-income families and first-generation college-goers.

In partnership with the National AfterSchool Association, we are happy to introduce this supplemental issue. Whereby each issue of New Directions for Youth Development usually presents research on one topic, this special issue was open to article submissions that could address any topic of youth development and after-school education.