The picture that this report portrays is the state of these neighborhoods and their children before the CCYD initiative began. In short, they are not without assets. There are many neighborhoods like them across America, neither hopeless nor comforting to the observer focused on how children fare. There is a base of assets, individual and institutional, on which to build the additional supports and opportunities which younger adolescents need to maximize their chances for a successful life as a youth and as an adult. The further good news is that those youth with greater doses of all the basic vitamins do better in school, have a higher sense of their own effectiveness, and engage in less risk activity.
Common sense is confirmed.
The discouraging news is how rapidly these supports and opportunities decline for youth 15 and older, and even more so for those 18 and older. As youth enter their mid-teens, their opportunities for adult guidance, especially of an instrumental nature relating to education and work, and their participation in structured activities that provide opportunity for positive social engagement and service, seem to decline drastically. Part of this is due to the lack of school involvement by older teens. These youth are left to their own devices much too early, in a very challenging world. The glimmer of light in this discouraging picture is that neither its cause nor its cure appears to lie solely in the private realm of family relationships, where both social policy and locally based initiatives are at best clumsy instruments of change.