Overview
For most of the history of the psychology of adolescence, the predominant criterion for judging adolescents’ developmental success has been whether young people avoid mortality and morbidity in the form of a litany of specific risk behaviors, ranging from avoidance of school failure, to avoidance of substance abuse, antisocial behavior and violence, and irresponsible sexual behavior. Only in the last 30 years has the movement called Positive Youth Development (PYD), with its focus on promoting desirable attitudes and behaviors and not only preventing undesirable ones, gained such sufficient traction that PYD can now be said to be the principal theoretical and applied framework for understanding and working with adolescents (see Scales et al., 2022 this volume). In this entry, the authors describe the development of and new directions for a comprehensive theory and measurement of a relatively newer element of PYD, adolescent thriving, as advanced by Benson and Scales (2009),...
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Acknowledgments
The authors acknowledge the generous support of the Thrive Foundation for Youth, whose financial support and conceptual contributions made possible Search Institute’s work from 2002 to 2015 on sparks and thriving, including the writing of the first version of this entry in 2011.
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Scales, P.C., Redmond, N., Benson, P.L. (2023). Thriving and Sparks. In: Levesque, R.J. (eds) Encyclopedia of Adolescence. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-32132-5_199-2
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