We believe that building developmental relationships with young people is the single most influential thing adults can do to help them succeed.
We know from our research that there’s a strong correlation between kids having strong developmental relationships in their lives and their likelihood to become thriving and contributing adults. But we also know that there are many kids who don’t have enough of these transformative relationships in their lives.
Search Institute’s ongoing applied research—in schools, youth programs, and other organizations—is identifying and working to remove many of the barriers to building developmental relationships with and among youth.
In this week’s video blog, Search Institute President and CEO Dr. Kent Pekel discusses one of the most surprising barriers that Search Institute has encountered: telling adults who work with young people to build better relationships can sometimes be experienced as an attack on those adults’ professional or personal sense of self-worth.
Dr. Pekel also discusses a couple of ways to avoid the trap of seeming to shame staff into building better relationships.
