Published January 2025
By: Leslie M. Booren
Highlights:
- January is National Mentoring Month!
- Researchers at Youth-Nex are continuing to contribute to a growing body of work on how and why effective mentoring works.
- In this post, we have rounded up all the news stories, blog posts and research articles published in 2024, each advancing our understanding of effective mentoring.
Digital Wellness
Teen use of social media has come under increasing scrutiny for a number of challenges, including mental health, interpersonal relationships, excessive screen time and more. This brief is geared towards helping youth mentoring programs support positive social media use for the youth they serve. Attention is paid to the opportunities for mentors to mitigate the risks and maximize the benefits of digital technology use by teens.
Young Women Leaders Program
UVA’s Young Women Leaders Program is a mentoring program that pairs female UVA students, or “big sisters,” with middle school “little sisters.” Olivia participated in YWLP both as a mentee in middle school and now as an undergraduate mentor while studying at UVA. In this video blog or vlog, she shares how YWLP empowers middle school girls as leaders in their schools and communities! She shares advice for adults too, saying "To the adults out there that are hesitant in joining a mentoring program, I say just get involved and just do it!"
Adult Professional Mentoring
School staff often want to implement evidence-based school mental health services but lack programming or professional development. This study evaluated how a set of training activities-sequential online learning modules combined with interprofessional telementoring. findings suggest that group-based telementoring may be a high-impact strategy for supporting the implementation of effective, culturally specific, and collaborative school mental health services.
Mentor Relationships
- Racial Discrimination
Although it is well-documented that school-based racial discrimination can have adverse effects on African American adolescents, the understanding of how socio-emotional factors can act as safeguards is still limited. This study explores whether mentor support and other factors help African American boys cope with school-based racial discrimination. Findings suggest that mentor support buffered against the negative impacts of school-based racial discrimination on psychological well-being.
- Ethnic-Racial Match
The quality of the mentoring relationship is considered a crucial determinant of these positive outcomes, with high-quality relationships linked to longer match durations and better youth outcomes. One factor hypothesized to influence the development and quality of mentoring relationships is the ethnic-racial match between mentors and mentees. Findings suggest that same-ethnic-racial matches reported a lower rate of change and slightly less relationship dissatisfaction at follow-up compared to cross-ethnic-racial matches.
Natural Mentors
- Antiracist Action
Racism and other forms of oppression threaten the well-being of racially and ethnically marginalized youth. Supportive intergenerational relationships that develop within youths’ everyday contexts may play a key role in catalyzing and reinforcing youths’ engagement in antiracist action. This review advances a novel model for understanding how supportive nonparental adults from youths’ everyday lives (i.e., natural mentors) influence youths’ positive developmental outcomes and participation in antiracist action.
- Supportive Parenting
This study examined whether autonomy-supportive parenting practices may be associated with Black adolescents' quantity of natural mentors (i.e., adults from youths' everyday lives who youth go to for support and guidance) via adolescents' confidence. Study findings suggest that Black adolescents' confidence may be an explanatory link in the association between autonomy-supportive parenting practices among primary caregivers and Black adolescents' quantity of natural mentoring relationships.
- College Adjustment
Underrepresented college students, particularly those attending a predominantly White institution (PWI), face unique challenges which support from natural mentors may help. This study investigated how cumulative appraisal support, emotional support, informational support, and instrumental support from natural mentors were related to outcomes. Findings suggest that natural mentorship during students’ first year of college has the potential to set a foundation for more positive adjustment among underrepresented students.
- Long-Term Impacts
In this EdWeek op-ed, the author discusses 4 ways schools can encourage teacher-student relationships using published work with Youth-Nex researchers. They describe the hidden impact of informal student mentoring, including findings that 1 out of every 6 students names a teacher, counselor, or coach as their most impactful mentor in life outside of their immediate family. And students who experience informal mentoring relationships go on to achieve considerably greater academic success.
If you have any comments or questions about this post, please email [email protected]. Please visit the Youth-Nex Homepage for up to date information about the work happening at the center.
