Urban Girls Revisited: Building Strengths

1. The Many Faces of Urban Girls: Features of Positive Development in Early Adolescence

1 The Many Faces of Urban Girls Features of Positive Development in Early Adolescence Richard M. Lerner, Erin Phelps, Amy Alberts, Yulika Forman, and Elise D. Christiansen For much of its history, the study of individual (ontogenetic) development was framed by nomothetic models (e.g., classical stage theories) that sought to describe and explain the generic human being (Emmerich, 1968; Lerner, 2002; Overton, 2006). Within the context of these models, both individual and group differences—diversity—were of little interest, at best, or regarded as either error variance or evidence for problematic deviation from (deficits in) normative (and idealized) developmental change (Lerner, 2004a, 2004b, 2006). With European American samples typically regarded as the groups from which norms were derived—and, as well, with male samples often set as the reference group for “normality” within the European American population (e.g., Block, 1973; Broverman, Vogel, Broverman, Clarkson, & Rosenkrantz, 1972; Maccoby, 1998; Maccoby & Jacklin, 1974)—racial, ethnic, and gender variations from these nomothetic standards were regarded not just as differences (as interindividual differences in intraindividual change). They were interpreted as developmental deficits (e.g., see Lerner, 2004a). This difference as deficit “lens” has been applied as well to youth developing within the urban centers of the United States (Taylor, 2003; Taylor, McNeil, Smith, & Taylor, in preparation). This association has occurred in part because youth from these areas are often children of color and/or they come from family backgrounds that were not ordinarily those involved in the research from which normative generalizations about developmental change were formulated (Lerner, 2004a; Spencer, 2006; 19 Way, 1998). This characterization of urban youth as generically “in deficit ”—as being “problems to be managed” (Roth & Brooks-Gunn, 2003a, 2003b) because of differences between them and “normative” samples in regard to ontogenetic characteristics associated with their race, ethnicity, gender, family, or neighborhood characteristics—is incorrect for both empirical and theoretical reasons. Empirically, this characterization is an overgeneralization; it paints urban youth in brush strokes that are far too broad. That is, as is true of all young people, urban youth are diverse, varying in interests, abilities, involvement with their communities, aspirations, and life paths (e.g., McLoyd, Aikens, & Burton, 2006; Spencer, 2006; Taylor, 2003; Way, 1998). For instance, the opportunity advantages of high socioeconomic status (SES) available to some European American urban youth do not protect them from manifesting risk and problem behaviors stereotypically associated with low SES urban youth (Luthar & Latendresse, 2002); in turn, the low SES of some urban youth of color does not mean that these young people engage in risk/problem behaviors or do not achieve scholastically or civically to degrees comparable to higher SES urban youth (Mincy, 1994). Moreover, research in life-course sociology (e.g., Elder & Shanahan, 2006), in life-span developmental psychology (e.g., Baltes, Lindenberger, & Staudinger, 2006), and in developmental biology (Gottlieb, 2004; Gottlieb, Wahlsten, & Lickliter, 2006; Suomi, 2004) attests to the presence of intragroup (e.g., intracohort) variation that is at least as great as intergroup/intercohort differences. Nevertheless, this within-group diversity has largely remained a hidden truth to many academics, policy makers, and even practitioners working in urban youth-development programs, who may assume that all urban youth may be characterized either as “at risk” or as already engaged in problematic or health-compromising behaviors. In addition to being empirically counterfactual, this view of urban youth sends a dispiriting message to young people, one that conveys to them that little is expected of them because their lives are inherently broken or, at best, in danger of becoming broken. Moreover, the deficit interpretation of urban youth as invariantly deficient is problematic for theoretical reasons as well as for empirical ones. The problems that do exist among some urban youth are neither inevitable nor the sum total of the range of behaviors that do or can exist among them. Derived from developmental systems theory, a positive youth development (PYD) perspective (Theokas & Lerner, in press) 20 c h a p t e r 1 stresses the plasticity of human development and regards this potential for systematic change as a ubiquitous strength of people during their adolescence. The potential for plasticity may be actualized to promote positive development among urban youth when young people are embedded in an ecology that possesses and makes available to them resources and supports that offer opportunities for sustained, positive adult-youth relations, skill-building experiences, and opportunities for participation in and leadership of...