How Context and Culture Influence Adults’ Sense of Reasonable Responsibility for Young People

Abstract

An increasing body of research points both to the important role that community influences, apart from demographic factors, play in the healthy development of young people, and also to ″features of the cultural context that signal rupture in key community dynamics″ (Benson et al., 1998, p. 140). The apartness of children and especially of youth from adults is a challenge to the well-being of society. Price, Ciocci, Penner, and Trautlein (1993) observed that young people need to be surrounded by positive ″webs of influence″ for healthy development. Not only do family, school, and community influences need to be consistent in promoting norms and opportunities. As we described in Chapter 1, there also need to be abundant connections among the family, school, and community resources in young people’s lives for effective socialization consistency and for young people to experience an abundance of social capital. Among those cultural themes that have worked in concert to keep Americans from placing children and adolescents at the center of civic life are the isolation of families, civic disengagement, the professionalization of care, the loss of socialization consistency, and the marginalization of youth (elaborated in Benson et al., 1998).