Youth Development and the National Initiative
Anchored in Healthy People 2010, the National Initiative to Improve Adolescent Health (NIIAH) aims to achieve 21 Critical Health Objectives. These objectives focus on individual health outcomes and related behaviors that pose the greatest threat to the health of adolescents and, subsequently, adults. Achieving these objectives will require reducing existing disparities in health among different groups of adolescents. To achieve these objectives NIIAH takes a broader view of adolescent health, recognizing the importance of healthy youth development and safe, nurturing environments that help young people make healthy decisions.
In focusing on healthy youth development, NIIAH takes a positive and affirming ecological view that emphasizes young people’s potential and the interactions between young people and their environment. A youth development approach nurtures young people’s assets, such as their emerging capacities for empathy, meaningful relationships, critical thinking and leadership. This approach sees well-being, strengths, and achieving one’s full potential as part of health, echoing the World Health Organization’s definition of health as “a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being”, and not merely the absence of health problems or risky behaviors.
In focusing on healthy environments, NIIAH recognizes that choices of individual adolescents are shaped by their environment. Families, schools, communities and public policies influence behavior. For example, most young people know that substance abuse is unhealthy, yet cigarettes and alcohol continue to be accessible and promoted to their age group. Many young people know about nutrition, but live and go to school in places where unhealthy foods are readily available and more affordable than healthier options. While young people are responsible for their choices, adults also bear responsibility for the world in which adolescents make these choices. This requires a societal commitment to young people.
The NIIAH’s broad approach has important implications for efforts to improve adolescent health. For youth development, this approach means that we measure success by adolescents’ personal growth and achievements, not just by problems averted. To create healthy environments, all members of society—adults and youth—have a role to play in improving adolescent health. Adolescents and their families need support from schools, faith-based organizations, businesses, policymakers, medical and health professionals, and many others. NIIAH’s approach also encourages us to empower adolescents to take greater leadership in creating healthy environments. This is an ambitious endeavor, and our young people deserve no less.
Youth Development Publications:
In Forum Focus: What’s Health Got to Do With It?, the Forum for Youth Investment attempts to examine practical strategies for integrating a health focus into existing programs and practices. They interview Claire Brindis from the National Adolescent Health Information Center and Kristin Teipel of the Konopka Institute and focus on the National Initiative. To download the issue, go to the Forum Focus, May/June 2005 Issue.
