Long-term studies of 4-H programs find that they help create positive youth development, with lessons that others can use
Young people “are agents in their own positive development,” says Richard Lerner. “It’s a time of enormous possibilities for positive growth.” Here, kids play at a 4-H summer camp in Minnesota this summer. Photo: Courtesy of National 4-H Council
All too often when you read about teenagers, the focus is on the negative. But Richard Lerner has long looked on the brighter side, trying to document aspects of young people’s lives that bring positive outcomes.
Back in 2001, he and colleagues began a 10-year nationwide study of programs at 4-H, the largest national youth-serving organization, and focused on what they called positive youth development. Over the decade, they surveyed more than 7,000 participants from 42 states.
“Every young person has characteristics that could be regarded as strengths or as assets in their life, even though several decades ago most psychologists were still using a deficit model of youth,” says Lerner, professor and Bergstrom Chair in Applied Developmental Science in the Eliot-Pearson Department of Child Study and Human Development. “That strength-based approach was the foundation of the positive youth development perspective.”
The initial study found that the programs offered by 4-H organizations had positive outcomes for their participants, leading to more fulfilling lives and community involvement.
In 2020, Lerner and his colleagues were commissioned to do a follow-up study, to see if they could replicate the results found in the first survey. They focused on 4-H program participants in New York state—in part because of the strong urban participation in 4-H there—as well as four other states, and followed up with some original study participants to track outcomes.
Having character “is really important for all kids, everywhere—a moral compass, knowing what’s right and wrong, and a commitment to do the right thing. We need a lot of that in this country at this point, in my view. Character means doing the right thing when no one’s watching.”
That study was recently completed, and the results are encouraging. The researchers again found that participation in 4-H led to positive personal change for young people, both for those taking part in the program now and for former participants. The lessons don’t apply to just 4-H programs, either, Lerner says.
“It turns out that the level of positive youth development overall is not that different between 4-H and Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, and Boys and Girls Clubs,” says Lerner. “What is different, especially for 4-H girls, is their contribution to their community. They’re taking it on as their passion for making a positive difference in their world. We see this in urban girls, suburban girls, all races.”
What’s Happening Today
4-H is the largest youth-serving organization in America, says Lerner, with more than 6 million participants. It started out more than a century ago focusing on youth in rural, agricultural communities, but now is active in every county in the U.S., including suburban and urban areas. Children from kindergarten to high school can participate through in-school and after-school programs, community clubs, and 4‑H camps.
The first study found that as kids increasingly participated in 4-H, anxiety, depression, and risky behaviors went down. “It wasn’t a perfectly inverse relationship, but it was significant,” says Lerner. “In addition, we found that things such as the ability to regulate yourself and have a hopeful future were all strengths that kids came out of it with.”
In 2019, the National 4-H Council—a private foundation that works with the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Cooperative Extension System that oversees 4-H—funded the follow-up study. Lerner and his wife, Jackie Lerner, a professor of applied developmental and educational psychology at Boston College, were again co-principal investigators.
“Every young person has characteristics that could be regarded as strengths or as assets in their life, even though several decades ago most psychologists were still using a deficit model of youth.”
“In addition to seeing how those who participated in 4-H when they were younger were doing in their young adult years, we looked at youth in 4-H today, wanting to see if similar things were happening as before,” says Mary Buckingham, AG19, project director of the recent study. She received her Ph.D. under Lerner and analyzed the data from the first study, and is now a research assistant professor at Eliot-Pearson.
The replication study began just as the COVID-19 pandemic began in 2020, making research more challenging. For the main part of the study, to see if they could validate prior findings, researchers surveyed 465 current 4-H participants, and separately surveyed 332 young adults who had taken part in the first study. They also did 20 in-depth interviews with the young adult participants.
Seeing the Positives
They found that participation in 4-H led to what they call the “Five Cs” of positive youth development: competence, confidence, character, connection, and compassion.
“Competence refers to being able to do the things you need to do to be a successful, flourishing, thriving person—obviously academic competence is important, but more than that, so are social skills,” Lerner says.
Kids also need confidence—“not arrogance, but a sense of self that if I work at it, it will work out,” he says. “This is where self-regulation and hope for the future come in. If I work at it, I can succeed.”
“It’s a very dispiriting message to tell young people that they’re good because of what they don’t do. They don’t use drugs, they don’t engage in unsafe sex, they don’t bully,” Richard Lerner says. “We’ve treated kids as problems to be managed.” Photo: Alonso Nichols
Having character is critical, too. “This is really important for all kids, everywhere—a moral compass, knowing what’s right and wrong, and a commitment to do the right thing,” he says. “We need a lot of that in this country at this point, in my view. Character means doing the right thing when no one’s watching, so to speak.”
Youngsters also need to have a sense of connection, Lerner says. “The one thing that we all need in life is positive relations with other humans and with our world. It’s about having positive relations with family members, teachers, coaches, peers, and faith leaders,” he says, “how to start them, maintain them, secure them, and grow them.”
Finally, having a sense of compassion for other people is important, too. It is a sense “that it’s only equitable and fair that I work to care about other people getting opportunities.”
Put all those characteristics together, “and you get a civically engaged, positively engaged person in society,” says Lerner.
Positive engagement with young people is far better than focusing on the negatives, Lerner says. “It’s a very dispiriting message to tell young people that they’re good because of what they don’t do. They don’t use drugs, they don’t engage in unsafe sex, they don’t bully,” he says. “We’ve treated kids as problems to be managed.”
That doesn’t mean ignoring the struggles young people face. Every period in life has problems, after all. “The fact that there are problems in adolescence doesn’t make it a unique period,” says Lerner. “But what makes it a unique period is that there’s more potential for malleability, for plasticity—even more than infancy, because infants don’t have the cognitive capacity to regulate their own behavior intentionally, but adolescents do.”
Young people “are agents in their own positive development,” says Lerner. “It’s a time of enormous possibilities for positive growth.”
