Positive Youth Development (PYD)

 

The main role of the Positive Youth Development (PYD) is not only to prevent mental health problems and difficulties among youth, but to find an opportunity how to support their positive transformation finding a way, which could increases internal and external assets of young people. It could be achieved through school-based PYD programs like curriculum-based, leadership development, student-based mentorship programs, social-emotional learning (SEL) and others.

This report will make a review of some of the published literature related to PYD school-based programs, their application; prevalent trends, methodology and evaluation aiming to identify areas that could be subject of future research. The multidimensional structure of PYD school-based programs makes their implementations difficult, because of determinants connected with methodology, range and type of cohorts, quality of the programs and teachers who create them, school environment. There are still difficulties to spread PYD to low-and middle income countries. Additionally, different cultural, religious, and political contexts also determine the success of the school-based programs.

Last year’s Covid-19 also played a role in deterioration of PYD programs implementation due to the unprecedented degree of disruption and uncertainty the pandemic has brought to the lives of young people.

Hereby perspectives of implementation of the PYD approach mainly as a preventive measure, where increasing positive assets of youth is most important. Using PYD approach in schools, we can reach a large number of young people, increasing confidence, healthy behavior, flourishing and well-being in youth.