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At Risk Youth Sur-thrival Begins Deep Down in the Mind

By Jon Pekel, founder and president, MyGrowthPlan.Org, Inc. [a nonprofit growth planning service for high school and college students]

Youth Sur-Thrival at a Glance

Thesis:  Fundamental mindset and lifestyle change & development are critical to high school, college and life success, especially for “at risk” youth.

Part One: Parents, educators, and youth beware — we live amidst an alien, highly seductive pop culture that systematically undermines positive youth development.

Part Two: The primary root cause of America’s domestic and international achievement gap is rooted in recent, but changeable youth development mindset and lifestyle practices.

Part Three: As parents and educators, our job#1 is to role-model and help our teens and pre-teens make a fundamental fork-in-the-road mindset & lifestyle choice...and it all begins deep down in their still-under-construction youth brain and mind.

Part Four: Practically, here’s how we can help our youth develop and demonstrate a continuous growth planning mindset & lifestyle in their everyday life.

Share your comments about this article on the LearnmoreMN blog

Part One
Warning: Our Pop Culture is Toxic to Your Youth’s Development

One of the things that always fascinated me during my theological studies was how the early Christians, at great personal risk, managed to preserve their emerging Christian faith and lifestyle amidst a pervasively alien Roman and Greek culture that was filled with pagan gods, debauchery and hedonism.  But, in some ways, they had it easy.  At least they knew that the culture surrounding them was alien to everything their faith stood for and was a threat to their very sur-thrival as a people — sur-thrival being a word combining survive and thrive.

Today, most parents and educators assume that the cultural environment in which we raise and teach our youth is basically youth-affirming and youth-friendly. But, in its actual effect, I believe our profit-driven mass media pop culture (as seen in music, video games, films, advertising, clothing styles, etc.) is highly toxic, systematically undermining the development of our youth’s highly vulnerable, still-under-construction teen brain, mind, and resulting everyday lifestyle.

And, tragically, our pop culture’s most severe adverse impact falls upon those weakened family structures and youth subcultures most vulnerable to outside mass media influence.

Eight Characteristics of Today's American Youth Pop Sub-Culture
Our still in-progress research being conducted among the youth with whom we work has led us to identify the following eight mindset orientations and lifestyle predispositions demonstrated by many American youth, especially those often considered to be “at risk.”

  1. Self-esteem Orientation. Self-definition and self-esteem gained through acquiring things, experiences, and networks of “friends”...rather than through demonstrating intellectual rigor and academic performance in school.
  2. Role Model Orientation. Media hyped far-off heroes seen as role models...rather than role models coming from people close-in to them, such as family, teachers, or others around them.
  3. Directional Orientation. Strongly external peer-group-directed...rather than internal self-directed.
  4. Motivational Orientation. Extrinsic financial and other reward motivated...rather than intrinsic self-learning and pride-of-personal-achievement motivated.
  5. Learning Orientation. "Capture my interest and I may become motivated to learn what you have to offer"...rather than being self-motivated to find things interesting to learn and master.
  6. Effort Orientation. Get it the easiest and quickest way I can...rather than doing the hard step-by-step work now in order to reap the benefits later.
  7. Time Orientation. Live-in-the-present, take-a-day-at-a-time oriented...rather than future-oriented.
  8. Action Orientation. Hang back and re-act to things ... rather than pro-actively plan and take specific actions to make things happen in their everyday life.

Part Two
The Primary Root Cause of the Achievement Gap is Cultural

In my view, all too many well-meaning youth programs at the most respected schools, youth organizations, and colleges jump right to throwing time and money at solutions, without carefully defining the underlying root cause of the problem for which their solution, supposedly, is a corrective action.

It is for that reason that when I founded MyGrowthPlan.Org four years ago I spent months reviewing the achievement gap research and literature, since (more than anything else) I wanted my “retirement thing” nonprofit to make at least a small contribution to closing the U.S.’s domestic and international achievement gap.

Gradually, I came to the conclusion that the primary root cause of the achievement gap is NOT found in:

  1. The low socio/economic status of some people of color
  2. The still oppressive White mainline culture — that is in white racism
  3. Poorly performing teachers and schools, or in the 
  4. Inherent intellect or learning deficiencies of students of color.

Rather, my view is that the primary (though not the only) root cause of the domestic and international achievement gap can be found in some relatively recent, highly negative American youth development MINDSET values, beliefs, and attitudes and LIFESTYLE behaviors and practices. 

Specifically, I believe these parental and societal youth development orientations and practices (as exacerbated by our American pop culture described in Part One) undervalue and undermine three extremely critical youth development assets and capabilities:

  1. The excitement of learning, just simply for learning’s sake
  2. Formal academic achievement, including the ability to master a difficult subject and its often boring and tedious academic learning processes
  3. Self-motivated, internal-directed personal discipline and accountability for my own life.

Further, while our entire American culture exhibits some aspects of these negative youth development qualities, I believe they are particularly strong in some (but not all) segments of the Black and Latino communities, and in some segments of the White and Asian communities. But, as with earlier American sub-cultures, I believe these negative youth development orientations and practices are temporary and very fixable...if they are specifically identified, admitted, and addressed.

[By the way, this point of view on the cultural roots of the achievement gap is echoed in the works of black authors John McWhorter, Shelby Steele, Orlando Patterson, Juan Williams, Bill Cosby and Alvin Poussaint, as well as in the research of Stephan and Abigail Thernstrom, among others.]

Part Three
Job #1 To Close the Achievement Gap is Youth Development

In our work with at risk high school youth (after they have built their Growth Plan and head into the benchmarking phase of the program), we lead them through repeated use of a personalized Growth Planning PowerPoint Tutorial that highlights the following points:

  1. Your brain is still “under construction;” there are limited “windows of opportunity” for you to develop your brain; as with any muscle, your brain needs to be exercised to develop; and your teen years are especially critical for developing its adult capabilities.
  2. Your brain’s prefrontal lobe cortex is your mind’s CEO (Chief Executive Officer), responsible for considering consequences, higher-order thinking skills, and planning ahead.  And, it’s also your mind’s impulse control and put-on-the-brakes center, helping you to manage your quick-fire emotional responses to what’s going on around you.  But, your brain is still growing and rewiring itself, so it’s not yet fully capable of controlling your emotions like anger or your hormones, like your sex drive.
  3. To make sure you truly succeed in school and in life (and are not personally caught in the achievement gap), your Job #1 is to make a fundamental fork-in-the-road choice about the kind of mindset & lifestyle you want for your life.  You can choose either “a street survival” or a “continuous growth planning” mindset & lifestyle, as shown in this chart.

Teen mindset and lifestyle chart

Now, as parents and educators, it’s our Job#1 to role model and help our youth successfully make and demonstrate in their everyday life this basic fork-in-the-road mindset and lifestyle choice.

Part Four
How We Can Help Youth Develop a Growth Planning Mindset & Lifestyle

Based on our experience to date with providing growth planning services for at risk high school and college youth, here are two practical suggestions for parents, educators, youth workers and others if you would like to help a pre-teen or teen develop and demonstrate a continuous growth planning mindset and lifestyle in their everyday life.

  1. Develop and role model a continuous growth planning mindset in our own everyday life.  Some of us parents or teachers carry around in our heads what psychologist Carol Dweck calls a “fixed mindset” — the belief that some people have innate, natural, God-given talents, abilities, or advantages in their life … and others don’t.  This mindset makes those who have these qualities —“the “have’s” — feel that they’re constantly on the line “to prove” their innate talents, often causing them to avoid challenges that may prove that they’re really a “have not.”  For those we mentally label as “have not’s,” it often leads to our protecting them from failure by channeling them into dumbed-down activities, resulting in their being de-motivated, if not immobilized.

    On the other hand, when we as parents and educators have and demonstrate a continuous growth planning mindset in everything we do, we radiate to those around us that human qualities, talents, and abilities CAN be developed over time by demonstrating both a passion for continuous learning from our mistakes, and by demonstrating hard work and persistence in everything we do.
  2. Monitor and, if needed, change our own youth developmental practices. Specifically, here are five sets of questions that we as parents and educators should be asking ourselves about our own child and youth development practices.
    • Behavior control vs. mind development. Do I more often praise my youth for their successes, or scold and put them down for their failures?
    • Use of electronic media vs. self-generated creative activities. Do I more often use TV or video games as my youth’s “baby sitter” than I help and expect them to find creative things to do on their own?
    • Joy of learning. Do I spend quality time helping my youth learn and explore new and challenging things?  And, do I personally role model reading and discussing books (not just magazines) when youth are around me?
    • Developmental experiences. Do I encourage (and even require, if necessary) my youth to participate in formal and informal educational and developmental activities...or do I allow fear of my youth’s rejection or failure keep them from such activities?
    • The system vs. personal accountability. Do I think or say that some youth need to “work twice as hard” as others because “the system” is wired against some people? Or, do I hold my youth accountable for their own performance and let them know that they CAN overcome any barriers set in front of them?

And, here’s another suggestion — although, admittedly somewhat self-serving. You may want to explore using our growth planning mindset and lifestyle development process to help your youth along his or her developmental journey. If so, go to our Web site — www.mygrowthplan.org — and send us a message by using the “contact us” feature on the homepage.

Finally, here is how I would summarize this four-part article and my view of what, collectively, we need to do to help close our U.S. domestic and international achievement gap:

Unless we as parents, educators, youth workers, and concerned citizens make deep-down youth mindset & lifestyle change and development our Job #1 by placing youth development at the very heart of our collective efforts to help close the achievement gap, we’ll never succeed. Why? Because, in my view, the primary underlying root cause of the U.S. domestic and international achievement gap are our entire society’s defective, but highly fixable, youth development mindset orientations and behavioral practices, as exacerbated by our highly toxic, profit-driven, youth-fixated pop culture.

PLEASE SHARE YOUR THOUGHTS:  I know the achievement gap and youth development subjects are far more complex than I’ve described here, and that I am presenting a highly debatable view of their primary root cause and solution. Please share on the LearnmoreMN blog any comment, criticism, or suggestion you have on the topic.